I had heard of this book on Twitter and it happened to be in my library's e-books.

These are contemporary short stories from Norway and Europe (vacation). What interests me is the style being so entrenched in limited third person, and so reminiscent of Hemingway/Ingmar Bergman in austerity of tone and in the deceptive, superficial simplicity. One early story of two men meeting by chance in a park over and over reminded me of that kind of profound extremis in Knut Hamsun's Hunger. There's always something off, intriguing, and depressing. The pleasure in the book, for me, is that I often have this uncanny feeling that I'm reading something from the late 19th century but I know it's from today: feeling the revision of the present into something so clear and matter of fact and spare, without any quotidian little phrases is like looking at an abstract painting of a figurative scene--except that it moves.

If the book continues to be about loveless couples in awkward, tense scenarios, though, I'm going to bail.