American critics tend to invoke a common repertoire of tropes in their descriptions of Norwegian authors: the profundity of the prosaic, the transcendence of the quotidian, the existential and the unremarkable. To read Karl Ove Knausgaard is to “find even the most mundane action pulsing with, if not meaning, then at least beauty, which can function as its own kind of meaning.” Nobel laureate Jon Fosse’s prose is “bleak,” “spare and existential,” “austere,” “slow, lambent, druidic,” “intimate,” and “dirgelike.” Dag Solstad’s subject is “the heaped disappointments of existence.” Jenny Hval explores the “grotesque banalities of human existence.” Vigdis Hjorth “specializes in life’s subtle flavors and rhythms . . . between the lines of the mundane.” One could easily make a game of how frequently these words — banal, mundane, intimate, spare, austere, bleak, existential, human, and so on — appear. Bingø!
These descriptions are essentially apt. After all, permission to introspect is one of the privileges afforded to the citizens of the world’s most functional social democracy. Call it state-sanctioned existentialism, or “Scandinavian style”: as Sophie Pinkham wrote in this magazine of Knausgaard (who is Norwegian but lives in Sweden), “in Stockholm, as in New York, life is full of banality; but it’s a different banality, without credit card debt or massive student loans.” The welfare state, on the one hand, grants its subjects the ability to flourish, less fettered by material suffering — and on the other, allows them to stare unwaveringly into the abyss of their deepest problems. This is perhaps why so much Norwegian literature is haunted by questions of life, death, melancholy, and despair. Of this tendency, Norwegian literary scholar and critic Toril Moi recently remarked, “too much of this Nordic gloom all the time.”
To the extent that they sometimes feel like a litany of hurt, loss, and isolation, Hjorth’s novels are characteristic of this Scandinavian style. In the five translated into English — A House in Norway (2015, trans. 2017), Will and Testament (2016, trans. 2019), Long Live the Post Horn! (2012, trans. 2020), Is Mother Dead (2020, trans. 2022), and If Only (2001, trans. 2024) — there are two completed suicides by drowning, one attempted suicide by drowning, and several completed, ideated, or threatened suicides by alternative or unspecified means.
Four of the five novels’ protagonists are formerly married women with children: three divorced, one widowed. All have creative or writerly pursuits: two playwright–magazine editors, one painter, one textile artist, and — surely the most practical of them all — one journalist turned PR consultant. All live and work in the middle-class milieu of the greater Oslo region. Three are estranged from their families; the other two are simply alienated and distant from them. On at least a dozen separate occasions across the five novels, the protagonists drink a bottle of wine alone in a single sitting.
Hjorth’s work is a testament to the uncomfortable truth that we cannot redistribute our way out of ordinary suffering.
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These are some of contemporary literature’s most malaise-afflicted, ennui-stricken women. “Is grief my default setting?” asks Will and Testament’s Bergljot. “I have always felt alone in the world,” proclaims Is Mother Dead’s Johanna. If Only’s Ida has “an impending sense of doom or possibly her own death.” These characters’ misery — forgive me for invoking another trope here, the Nordic fog — is cast in ambient, desolate gray.
The fog that drifts over Oslo’s fjords and “comes down like a low ceiling” is “gray,” dawn is “gray,” hair is “gray,” Trondheim is “gray,” birds are “gray,” mice are “gray,” trees are “gray,” clouds are “gray,” suits are “gray,” sweaters are “gray,” scarves are “gray,” underwear is “gray,” old people are “gray,” faces are “gray,” Saturday morning is “gray,” November is “gray,” December is “gray,” spring is also “gray,” the sky is often “gray” and sometimes it is even “grayer than it usually is when it rains.” “Finally,” Long Live the Post Horn!’s Ellinor remarks as the fog descends, “everything was covered in gray.”
Though one could certainly employ any of the adjectives banal, mundane, intimate, spare, austere, bleak, existential, or human in reference to Hjorth’s novels, they are also slyly funny, and unabashedly political. (By contrast, Fosse’s writing has been described as “pitched both higher and lower than the political realm,” while Knausgaard, in an interview, suggested that politics exists in his writing only to the extent that it’s part of the world.)
Hjorth’s work grasps at the social experience of social democracy in an atomized world, and the misery and psychic pain that lurk underneath Norway’s ascendence in the global rankings of the purportedly happiest countries. To an American audience, which so often looks to the Nordic model as the horizon of our political efforts, Hjorth’s work is a testament to the uncomfortable truth that we cannot redistribute our way out of ordinary suffering, and that social democracy is at best only palliative for the condition of alienation. Faced with our yet incurable, perhaps terminal isolation, Hjorth asks: How do we go on living?
These five translated novels — whose publication in the original Norwegian spans from 2001 through the present — are only a small sample of Hjorth’s oeuvre. Since her first appearance in print in 1983, Hjorth, now in her mid-sixties, has produced some two dozen works of fiction and nonfiction that address common themes: failed relationships, familial estrangement, alcoholism. Like Knausgaard, Hjorth is a writer of virkelighetslitteratur, or “reality literature” — what in English we call autofiction. Her untranslated novels include Hva er det med mor (What’s wrong with mother, 2000), about a mother who drinks too much (while writing it, she was asked, “Did your mother drink?” to which she responded, “No, I drink!”); Hjulskift (Wheel change, 2006), about a literature professor’s love affair with a car salesman (based on Hjorth’s own relationship with a car salesman); Tredje person entall (Third person singular, 2008), about a woman who kills herself after being imprisoned for murder; and Tredve dager i Sandefjord (Thirty days in Sandefjord, 2011), about the thirty days Hjorth herself spent in prison for drunk driving.
In the Anglophone world, Hjorth is best known for Will and Testament. The novel centers on Bergljot, a fiftysomething theater critic, magazine editor, and divorced mother of three, who intervenes in a family inheritance dispute after more than two decades of estrangement from her parents, sisters, and brother. Her parents declare their intention to divide their property equally among the four children, except for the family’s two summer cabins on Hvaler, a group of islands in Norway’s southeast. The cabins are to go to Astrid and Åsa, Bergljot’s two sisters, while Bergljot and her brother Bård — also estranged from the family — are to be paid out in accordance with “ridiculously low valuations.”
The dispute is, in Bergljot’s eyes, not just financial but “moral”: as is only made explicit two-thirds of the way through the novel, Bergljot was sexually abused by her father in her childhood, which her family continues to deny. For more than twenty years after her abuse, Bergljot lived in “a trance of fear, of loss, it was fog and confusion” — confusion about why her mother fretted over her so anxiously, confusion about why she feared her father. Early on, in a memory two decades before the events of the novel, she starts writing a one-act play, only to suffer violent episodes of physical “pain that defies description” whenever she works on it. The words she has written on the page crack her life open, though it is nearly 150 pages later that we learn what they are: “He touched me like a doctor, he touched me like a father.” In that moment, Bergljot says, “it all came back to me, it hit me like a blow, it was like fainting. I understood everything and everything fell into place.” She contacts a psychoanalyst, who informs her that she is eligible for “state-funded psychoanalysis four times a week for as long as [is] necessary.”
Imagine! Four sessions a week, billed to the state. In many ways, Will and Testament hinges on this particular social democratic largesse: psychoanalysis upends Bergljot’s life, irreparably shattering her familial relationships and catapulting her into a new world. Four times a week, for more than three years, she shows up to her analyst’s office, “desperate to get on the couch, pour out [her] heart, cry and despair,” to dredge up her memories of her childhood and work through her feelings for the “unobtainable” married professor with whom she is having an affair. Psychoanalysis holds out the possibility that we can suffer less, or suffer better, but this requires us to stare directly into our troubles (and directly at the ceiling), to devote hours on the couch — hours that few poorly paid, underinsured American editor-critics can devote or afford.
How is the state able to fund such beneficence? Drill, baby, drill! Norway’s coffers are replete with the profits from the country’s extensive extraction of petrochemicals. The state sits on the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund, valued at $1.7 trillion, which has helped the country more ably weather some of the global crises — staggering inequality and slowing economic growth — that have buffeted its neighbors, Sweden most notably. Hjorth is finely attuned to the vast political contradictions of bourgeois life under the Norwegian petrostate, and the self-serious complacency that it elicits among the liberal and the affluent. The fact that four of Hjorth’s novels are published by Verso, the Anglophone world’s foremost left-wing press, offers a clue to the political dimensions of Hjorth’s writing. (Though this, of course, invites the question: What exactly is contemporary left-wing fiction, at least in Verso’s estimation? Curiously, Scandinavians — and specifically Norwegian women — are overrepresented in Verso’s fiction imprint: the translated works of Hjorth and her compatriot Jenny Hval comprise a third of its titles.)
Hjorth is as concerned with the material as she is the existential, turning her keen eye back on the state and the lives and worlds it authorizes. Consider this analysis of violence in A House in Norway:
What kind of violence are we talking about? The classic definition where intentions, means, the situation and the outcome are straight out of a crime novel? Or a definition of violence based on the consequences of our behavior, e.g. how our trade policy decisions affect living conditions in Ethiopia. If we choose the latter . . . Norway was a very violent society. But if we choose the former, and it says a lot about us that we do . . . then Norway is a society with very little violence.
In turn, the novels suggest the limitations of a certain kind of empathy expressed in a liberal, humanistic register, and the failure of these sentiments to inform how we should treat the people close to us. This is embodied in the figure of Astrid, Bergljot’s infuriatingly impartial sister, who despite being “a kind of officially good person” because of her human rights work, does nothing more than equivocate regarding Bergljot’s accusations of sexual abuse. When Tale, Bergljot’s daughter, decides to end contact with the family, she describes it as “a political act.” “What would happen to the world,” she wonders, “if everyone behaved like [your] family . . . and got away with it?”
In Will and Testament, Hjorth even draws an explicit, and striking, parallel between sexual abuse and Israel’s apartheid regime: “They build walls . . . to keep the Palestinians out . . . and not just for security reasons, but so they won’t have to look at them and recognize themselves in them, so they won’t be reminded of their own humiliating history of victimhood, they can’t stand them because of what they have done and continue to do to them.” This idea is crucial for Hjorth: that our relationships are both a mirror on, and a building block of, the world; that genocide and incest, or the political and the personal, spring from the same psychic forces.
This, of course, brings us back to psychoanalysis, and to the way Hjorth’s writing spirals and folds. “What do we repress, what do we deny, that’s the question which must be asked over and over,” she posits, “so that we aren’t blinded by our technological advances, our scientific progress, our magnificent new architecture, our well-ordered, well-regulated society here in Norway where a prime minister once said something so very un-Freudian: It’s typically Norwegian to be good.”
Imagine! Four sessions a week, billed to the state.
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Much of Hjorth’s writing centers on psychoanalytic concerns — parent-child relationships, trauma, memory, dreams — and invokes a kind of psychoanalytic idiom: “repression,” “love object,” “denial,” “fantasy,” and so on. Will and Testament is the most explicitly psychoanalytic of the five in translation. (The novel includes a meditation on the divergences between Freudian and Jungian thought and devotes a lengthy sequence to a close reading of Civilization and Its Discontents.) But the reenactment of childhood dynamics and the capacity to transcend them persist across her works. Bergljot asks: “Are we caught in such webs, spun in our early years?” Or, as Johanna of Is Mother Dead asserts: “the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.”
Will and Testament is narrated and structured repetitively and cyclically, to mine every thought, event, and insight for its last ounce of meaning, to turn over every stone in case there might be something new hiding beneath it. This evokes the form of psychoanalytic treatment, in which a subject might revisit the same moments and experiences over and over, iteratively and obsessively, seeing their perspective change over time. Phrases, sentences, repeat nearly verbatim within short sequences. For example, Bergljot describes reading one of Astrid’s dismissive emails:
Because the rape of a child is extremely serious, such allegations are treated with the utmost seriousness, she wrote. I drank my coffee and read on, it didn’t feel as if it was about me. Because the rape of a child is extremely serious, such allegations are treated with the utmost seriousness, she wrote in a hectoring tone as if to point out to me how serious my allegations were — just in case it hadn’t crossed my mind. She used serious and seriousness in the same sentence, she took it so seriously, with the utmost seriousness.
It is often unclear whether Will and Testament’s narration is in the present or in the past, and exactly how far — we might call this a kind of psychoanalytic time. One almost feels like a towel swirling inside a washing machine, being wrung out of water (in fact, Will and Testament contains the greatest meditation on laundry I have ever read). Hjorth employs this style to greatest effect in Will and Testament, mirroring the structure of recurring traumatic memory, or the compulsion to repeat, and immersing the reader in Bergljot’s constant revisiting as she returns, disoriented, to events earlier in her life in fits and starts.
It is easyto seeWill and Testament as itself a revisitation of one of Hjorth’s much earlier novels, If Only — the most recent of Hjorth’s works to be translated into English, though it was published in Norwegian in 2001. Ida, the novel’s protagonist, is evidently a proto-Bergljot: both edit contemporary drama magazines, both write plays, both are passionlessly married to nice but unsatisfying men, both pine after married university professors, both experienced a “childhood trauma,”1 both are estranged from their families because of it, both are in analysis. Bergljot describes her first session as follows:
There were four of us, I was the favorite. As I said it, in the embarrassing silence that followed because I got no reaction and was unable to carry on, a bolt of lightning shot through my whole body. The words with which I had so often begun the story about myself, revealed me in all their mendacity. It wasn’t true, it was the exact opposite! But this obvious fact hadn’t dawned on me until this moment .
Meanwhile, Ida’s first session:
“I was the favorite,” she says, her life story always begins like this, she always opens with this line. It hangs in the air. What did she just say? I was the favorite. What is she saying? “Oh,” she says. “Oh, no,” she says. “It’s not true,” she says. . . . The words lie, they grate in her ears, it is embarrassing, she is ashamed. . . . “I wasn’t the favorite,” she says, it is better, but it hurts.
If Only seems to be the same story seen through a different aperture, with the weight of the component parts reversed. While Bergljot’s love affair is only mentioned in passing, Ida’s love affair forms the crux of the story, and the family estrangement recedes into the background. Where Will and Testament is measured, If Only is frantic and breathless — at once showing Hjorth’s stylistic evolution and reflecting the respective protagonists’ psychic states. Bergljot, after all, has already been through years of analysis, and has integrated her experience of abuse into her self-understanding. Ida, however, is still primarily animated by the pain of assimilating this memory, and she experiences this pain as love.
The novel, narrated by Ida in her later years, follows her through the better part of her thirties, over the arc of her tortured, bitter relationship with Arnold Bush, a professor of German drama at a university in Trondheim, whom she meets on the fourth page of the book and with whom she falls violently in love by the thirteenth. The two meet at a theater seminar; both are married. For the first several years, Arnold keeps Ida at a distance, promising nothing, sending her cryptic postcards that she pores over for evidence of his mutual feeling. (“Dear gracious lady. I send you greetings from the back of the cathedral in Bonn, where we, that is, I, am drinking a profane pilsner. It is, however, unrequited. Metaphorically from A.” “Sorry about the silly postcard. I realized it was completely wrong when I spoke to you on the phone. Elegant or elephant from Arnold.”) Ida drifts through a divorce, imploding her family without a hint of sorrow, leaving her distraught husband and dazed children trailing behind. When, after several years of waiting, Arnold finally does the same, their ill-fated love commences.
The novel is difficult to read because Arnold is a loathsome love object. He is impulsive, temperamental, and controlling; he lashes out when Ida travels or sees friends without him; he is lazy (“if he forgets his jacket, she will run up seven flights of stairs to fetch it”); he destroys her possessions in fits of rage; he flips tables; he brawls with her colleagues; he is constantly drunk; he is incorrigibly unfaithful. After several trysts with his undergraduate students, he says, as if it is a profound realization, “If we’re going to be together properly, then I have to stop doing that.”
Yet Ida subsumes her life into Arnold’s. She too is constantly drunk. (In this way, the novel bears a devastating resemblance to Tove Ditlevsen’s Dependency. Ditlevsen, another of Hjorth’s influences, was 20th-century literature’s depressed Scandinavian woman par excellence, and Hjorth is a worthy heir to the krone.) Ida too is an inveterate cheater — over the course of the novel she sleeps with Arnold’s best friend; her friend’s husband in his guest bedroom while his wife is asleep next door; a very nice man named Trond Hagfors who yells “My name is Trond Hagfors!” when he climaxes; and several nameless men in one-night stands.
Onward Ida and Arnold go, egging each other on, spiraling into increasing seclusion and desperation. They binge drink morning to evening (at one dinner, they drink “fourteen beers and sixteen shots of schnapps” between them), they urinate on each other during sex, they scream, they cry, they promise never to break up, “they beat each other until the blood flows, they give each other terrifying scars, they bring about mutual destruction.” The sense that it cannot work gnaws at Ida. Early on, “she thinks once or twice or several times: I can’t do this for ever.” Forty pages later: “It can’t go on, it has to end, I can’t take any more!” (Reader, we are only halfway through the novel.) When their relationship finally splinters, she goes back to her analyst; “it turns out,” Hjorth writes, “he was right after all.”
Hjorth’s most recent novel,Is Mother Dead, published in Norwegian in 2020 and in English in 2022, is something of a coda to If Only and Will and Testament. The third of Hjorth’s family novels in translation, Is Mother Dead centers on Johanna, a painter who is estranged from her family. Nearly three decades prior, Johanna fled Norway for Utah with her American husband in order to escape her domineering father and acquiescent mother (sound familiar?). When she declines to return home for her father’s funeral, her mother and sister cut her off. At the start of the novel, Johanna returns to Oslo for a retrospective of her work, and makes increasingly frantic attempts to reach her mother, both literally and metaphorically — Johanna wants to contact her, but also simply to know about her, feel close to her. Johanna calls, writes letters, stakes out her mother’s apartment, covertly tails her around the city, throws snowballs at her window so hard they shatter the glass, and roots through her garbage, ultimately forcing a devastating confrontation. Why? Johanna can’t say. To reconcile? Maybe.
Johanna’s stalking quickly becomes entangled in her artistic process; what knowledge of her mother she gleans becomes fodder for her painting. Johanna treats art as something of a therapeutic practice — “suffering comes back, but as form, that is art,” she claims — that reveals the unconscious. “I thought I was drawing Mum,” she says, “but I was drawing myself.” But while art may be a means of catharsis, it also has a distorting effect. “The relationship of a work of art to reality is uninteresting, the work’s relationship to the truth is crucial,” Johanna explains. She is painfully aware that her images of her mother and her sister Ruth, and their images of each other, are fictions: “I invent Ruth, that’s what’s so frightening, and Ruth invents me, and we both invent Mum.”
Neither social life nor solitude engenders the end of suffering; both are simply channels for — or sublimations of — it.
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Is Mother Dead, I think, must be understood as an account, and perhaps a defense, of Hjorth’s artistic approach. Hjorth herself was at the center of a controversy about “truth” and “reality” regarding Will and Testament, after her family accused her of violating their privacy and falsifying real events in the novel, provoking a national conversation about the ethics of mining one’s private life for art — and eerily replicating the familial disavowal that the novel depicts.2 Hjorth’s defense of “truth” seems to rhyme with Johanna’s — and in fact, Hjorth said in an interview that “Johanna expresses the relationship between art and truth very well.” Yet Hjorth retains a remarkable humility about art’s prerogatives. In A House in Norway, the protagonist,Alma, realizes of her own artwork that “she had taken what she wanted because that’s what literature and art do, that’s their domain and privilege, out of sync with reality.”
In Is Mother Dead, Hjorth’s contention is that in revisiting and repeating, we might discover something anew, rather than simply reenact a compulsion ad nauseam. Here, she looks anew at estrangement; her prose is leanest, and the story is winnowed down to its most fundamental themes. Because Johanna’s family conflict is much more mundane than that of Will and Testament or If Only, Is Mother Dead focuses less on the cause of estrangement than the relation of estrangement itself, and the experience of alienation from a person one once knew well — as well as the wild acts of invention it engenders. The novel reconsiders the process of self-narration, and particularly the total collapse of narrative, memory, and imagination, as Johanna jumps fluidly between the three with little differentiation. For long stretches of the novel, she meticulously constructs stories of her mother that are so detailed they seem like observations made while peering into her windows. But we’re reminded (only sometimes) that they’re entirely fictive. For example:
Mum undresses. She places her clothes on a chair, is it at this moment she feels most alone? She is pale, she has yet to go abroad for some winter sun, I remember Mum’s white skin, the freckles on her chest, her tanned cheeks all those summers in the mountains, she changes into her pyjamas and then a cashmere cardigan which isn’t folded, but hangs on a hanger. Mum puts on her slippers and goes to the living room, sits down in her favorite armchair and turns on the television, she watches a documentary about African wildlife. It’s reassuring, that’s why I have her watch it .
Hjorth also returns to the repetitive, cyclical style she adopts in Will and Testament and If Only — but here, there is so little extraneous matter that the effect is maximally claustrophobic. Many of the pages have just a short paragraph, or even one or two lines of text on them, the blank spaces suggesting the weight of the narrative’s various omissions. In fact, for nearly the entire book, there is not a single line of synchronous dialogue; almost all of the novel’s action is remembered or invented. It is a staggering exercise in immersive interiority, one that impressively displays Hjorth’s talents as they’ve matured over her four-decade career.
IfWill andTestament,If Only, and Is Mother Dead in some ways function as a triptych, Hjorth’s other two translated novels — A House in Norway and Long Live the Post Horn! — are themselves of a piece. The former treat politics and life under social democracy only obliquely; these themes are central in the latter.
A House in Norway was the first of Hjorth’s novels published in English, and is the only one not published by Verso. It tells the story of a dispute between landlord and tenant — drawn from Hjorth’s own experience as a landlord, where she failed, in her own words, to be a “politically correct, generous human being.” The novel follows Alma, a divorced textile artist and youthful fellow traveler turned embittered middle-aged recluse, who makes her living weaving tapestries for bands, trade unions, and town halls and renting out a small apartment in her house. Alma leases the apartment to a Polish couple, Alan and Slawomira, and their young daughter, Izabela. The novel spans the seven years of their tenancy and their escalating conflict with Alma over heating bills, rent hikes, hot water, driveway clearing, rodents, and the like. Alma is an inconsiderate, retaliatory landlord, oblivious to her tenants’ hardships. She torments them for years until finally, in a burst of rage, she evicts them.
Alma is, nakedly, the incarnation of the liberal, bourgeois pretenses that Hjorth so shrewdly skewers. Take Alma’s contemptuous yet unconfessed xenophobia: “It was crafty of the Polish couple to come to Norway and have their child here, so that the Norwegian authorities would have to step in if things went pear-shaped,” she sneers. “Why didn’t they just go back to Poland; she supposed it must be even worse there.” Or her middle-aged political apathy: her early artworks “were highly radical in their themes, women’s liberation and peace work, but the time for that seemed to have passed, although wars were still being fought and Norway now took an active part in them.” Or her sense of entitlement to property ownership (even though she was only able to buy her home thanks to her inheritance), calling the Polish family “parasites” on her land.
In her examination of the landlord-tenant relationship, Hjorth makes literal the material relationships of property and power obscured by the family form. After all, Will and Testament is, in essence, about a set of housing crises — not only the cabin inheritance dispute, but also the problem of inhabiting a space, and sharing a home, with a tyrant. Bergljot, for example, recalls how she felt, before she ended contact with her family, giving her father a key to her house in order for him to help renovate the bathroom: terror at his power to access her home, and vulnerability to his intrusion. Her fear parallels Slawomira and Izabela’s fear of Alma, who enters their apartment unannounced, rifles through their mail, and collects more and more of their meager income. When Alma opens their door, “the faces behind it looked scared as usual,” and Izabela “cowered behind her mother’s legs with big, anxious eyes.” In these moments, the distinction between Hjorth’s family and society novels is not so clear: our intimate relationships are the enactment, in miniature, of all kinds of social relationships — landlord and tenant, analyst and analysand, government and citizen.
Long Live thePost Horn!, the better known of the two we-live-in-a-society novels, could be aptly subtitled How I Learned to Stop Wanting to Kill Myself and Love Civic Institutions. It follows the efforts of Ellinor, a PR consultant, to help the Norwegian postal workers’ union (Postkom) oppose a European Union directive that would introduce competition to the Norwegian postal service.3
The novel opens on Ellinor languishing in profound malaise. She is uninspired by her work, ambivalent about her boyfriend, and distant from her family. She doesn’t “believe in great joy”; she feels “as if [her] life is too banal for [her] despair.” After her business partner, Dag, drowns himself — prompting her to entertain doing the same; “even if you don’t drown yourself,” she muses, “you’ll still end up dead and so you might as well stop swimming today as tomorrow or the day after” — Ellinor takes over his work with Postkom, which is organizing a grassroots mobilization within the Labour Party to veto the directive in Brussels, or at least to exact some concessions.
The postal directive may seem an excruciatingly boring subject for a novel, but it instantiates the EU’s neoliberal turn. (This may not make it sound less excruciatingly boring; whenever Ellinor talks about the postal directive to any of her friends or family, they “change the subject immediately.”) Because of its monopoly on mail delivery, the Norwegian postal office keeps postage costs low and wages for its union workers high. If implemented, the postal directive would have hiked costs, worsened the service’s reliability, and forced the post office to cut salaries and pensions, as well as lay off full-time workers and replace them with contingent labor.
Post Horn! is a paean to the virtues of social democracy. Through the figure of the postal worker, the institution of the post office, the medium of the letter, Ellinor learns to appreciate the generalized, diffuse connectedness that robust social institutions can offer. Her life is invigorated in the process: she discovers that she can transcend her malaise through earnest collectivism. “Through working on the postal directive,” she declares, “I had learned the value of . . . living well and in good spirits. I knew now that no one is insignificant and that every day every one of us must choose whether to build civilization or the opposite, let the world fall apart, and that even the smallest things present each of us with a challenge.” It’s like something out of a proletarian novel — by the end of the novel, she picks up an issue of Klassekampen (Norway’s left daily newspaper), literally “class struggle.”
Alma, too, finds herself edified by the end of A House in Norway. She realizes, too late, that she has terrorized and spurned her tenants. It dawns on her that “a child’s impressions and experiences of other people during its first six years, particularly those that were frightening, were etched into her,” and thus that she would always “haunt [Izabela] at night like a witch or a bogeyman.” She vows, in turn, to “see her own limitations and her weakness and her stupidity, because only those who lose their illusions, continue to learn”; “to bury her stupid wishes”; and to “promote the earthly, ordinary life, the difficult, daily commitment.”
Some detractors might find these novels overly simplistic or didactic — the union gives her meaning; so what? Read in the context of Hjorth’s other novels, though, this characterization is not so straightforward: while these characters find salvation through social life and mutual obligation, others find it through solitude and recusal. Ida leaves Arnold. Love, she explains, like “all living things,” is “doomed to die.” Johanna returns to the United States, her mother “dead in [her].” Bergljot renounces her mother and sisters, though she turns toward her children, grandchildren, and friends. Salvation, in Hjorth’s novels, does not mean happiness. Neither social life nor solitude engenders the end of suffering; both are simply channels for — or sublimations of — it.
“Suffering is a link that brings the magical pleasure happiness can never deliver” — this line appears in If Only, attributed to Tove Ditlevsen, and reappears twice, nearly verbatim, in Is Mother Dead. I take it to be something of a thesis statement for Hjorth. Solitude offers particular pleasures: the isolated person enjoys the privilege to invent everyone else; she experiences the contentment of the hegemony of her own mind. But suffering is the link that ties people together in common struggle. Happiness, however, is a fiction; it masks our pervasive alienation. (“If I didn’t know that your parents had two other children,” says Bergljot’s son, Søren, “I would think it was a normal, happy family.”) It’s not a bleak prescription, I think. This is Hjorth’s provocation: that only by yielding to our unhappiness can we begin to live.
Toril Moi notes that this is an inexact translation: the Norwegian text refers to Ida’s “difficulty” (det vanskelige) and “injury” (skaden), rather than “trauma.” ↩
Knausgaard’s My Struggle, too, famously elicited significant controversy about autobiographical fiction. (Hjorth amusingly argues that Knausgaard, as a writer of confessional literature, belongs to a “Norwegian female [literary] tradition.”) In Hjorth’s case, many readers gathered that the events depicted in Will and Testament happened as such. Hjorth admits to using material from private family correspondences for the novel but maintains that she was given permission. Her mother and sisters claim that she violated their privacy and maligned their family with false allegations of sexual abuse. Most ironically, Hjorth’s real sister, Helga Hjorth, a human rights lawyer and clearly the model for Astrid, published a counter-novel, refuting Vigdis’s accusations and offering her own account of the family story. ↩
Norway is not a member of the EU but is subject to some EU laws and regulations; the postal directive described in the novel was proposed by the real-life EU and vetoed by the Norwegian Labour Party in 2011. Anti-EU politics is something of a thread in Hjorth’s novels: in If Only, Ida and Arnold join an anti-EU demonstration on the night of Norway’s 1994 referendum on EU membership in which the “no” vote triumphed. Opposition to the EU in Norway cuts across traditional political divides, with parties on both the left and the right landing both for and against; anti-EU sentiment is largely not a rejection of EU neoliberalism, but instead reflects the belief that Norway should not be subject to EU regulation of its profitable natural resources. ↩
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