Stay with me

"For Hanne Ørstavik's unnamed narrator, fear is a second skin. She recalls Pappa running with an axe, furious and drunk on homemade vodka--he claims he only meant the ax as a gavel, a 'prop,' even so it took a sedative and several men to bring him to the snow-covered ground. Our narrator, a successful writer, is fifty-three, her father a frail twig, but the fear from her past still envelopes her. In urgent prose, the contours of her life emerge:...