Presens maskin

Present Tense Machine introduces us to the mother and daughter Anna and Laura. In one startling second, the world splits into parallel universes at one point in the 1990s. Anna and Laura are pulled into separate universes. Twenty-one years later, life has gone on as if nothing happened, but in each of the women’s lives, something’s not quite right.

Present Tense Machine is a novel about life’s irreparable loneliness. And about love.

Nominated for the Youth's Critics' Prize 2018

Foreign Sales
Denmark, Gutkind
USA, Farrar, Straus og Giroux
Sweden, Nirstedt
UK, Lolli Editions
Slovakia, BRAK

Praise:

"A slippery metafictional take on the peril and power of words and how identities fracture and compartmentalize across a lifetime, from one of the most exciting contemporary voices in international literature . . . Another masterful translation by Dickson of Øyehaug's wily, mercurial prose . . . A perfect Mobius strip of a novel that playfully examines the creative and destructive potential of language."
Kirkus (starred review)

"Playful and poignant . . . The ruminations on existence and purpose consistently captivate . . . Øyehaug steers this to a wholly satisfying conclusion."
Publishers Weekly

«Øyehaug is splendidly clever, perhaps too clever for some. But she’s also thoughtful, using her elaborately conceived, interconnected narrative spirals to ask questions about the relevance and importance of stories, and about connections between the literarily lived life and the literally lived life. Simultaneously, she inquires about and, in spite of everything, enacts the divine power of language to create.»
Claire Messud, Harper's Magazine

«Øyehaug's utterly unique novel will sit with you long after you finish playing your part.»
Cory Oldweiler, Star Tribune

«[…] the novel is an ingenious pocket universe where time moves not just forward or even backward but in sideways leaps. Questions about the nature of reality are made poignant by the characters asking them: women struggling to understand who they are in the shadow of losses they can sense but not remember.»
Caitlin Horrocks, The New York Times

«Though the novel is hard to follow at times, Øyehaug builds tension with run-on sentences and almost no paragraph breaks. Even with the unconventional writing style, the story is a page-turner. Some may find Present Tense Machine a little too fantastical, but fans of speculative fiction or the film Interstellar will be in reading heaven.»
Emily Dugranru, Booklist

«It’s an immensely satisfying experience to read Kari Dickson’s expert translation in which Øyehaugh’s poetic talents soar, and there’s also a delightful irony in reading it in English rather than Norwegian, especially as it’s a story about how a misread word may send us into a wormhole. But doesn’t literature, poetry, language, have the power to change us?»
Chicago Review of Books

«The notion of parallel worlds brought into existence by error is based on the Bible story of the Tower of Babel in which God, offended by mankind's desire to build a tall structure to challenge his authority, introduced languages into their midst as a dividing tactic. But by synthesizing the sci-fi trope of parallel universes with stories from Genesis, as well as Greek mythology (i.e., Orpheus and Eurydice, Demeter and Persephone), Present Tense Machine — seamlessly translated by Kari Dickson — assumes varied yet unifying forms: as a gestational fable with a beginning, and middle, but no end; a metaphysical poem on infinite loop; a refutation and affirmation of mortality; and a lyrical essay on the gaps between an original text and its translation. Ultimately, as an ingeniously constructed "machine," Øyehaug's novel evokes a cosmos that can simultaneously expand and compress.»
Thúy ?inh, NPR

«Present Tense Machine is really a work about memory, which, of course, is the locus of all great novels, a rule without exception here. With ever-increasing urgency, it is the memories — real and imagined, recalled and forgotten — from which Øyehaug’s vivid characters and enigmatic narrator draw their power and propulsion. Lives half lived — , not lived, relived and alternatively lived —, are remembered in quotidian hideouts of domestic life, bringing ethos and intrigue to the deceptively simple storyline.»
D. W. White, West Trade Review

«[…] a powerful and unpredictable read. What does it mean to lose someone in a way that the world doesn’t seem to have language for? Present Tense Machine offers one answer.»...