Will and Testament

Unsettling, beautifully constructed

This was a novel that people could enjoy either as high literature or as a work of down-and-dirty revenge. The tabloids loved it as much as the broadsheets, and it became the bestselling novel of the year.

In a ruthless yet patiently delivered work, Hjorth does something that few writers achieve: Will and Testamentis both economical and overwhelming.

Will and Testament is a reminder that it’s easier to hide darkness than face it ... Hjorth argues cogently that conflicts and atrocities often stem from what a nation represses or denies.

Hypnotic

Precise, contemplative, and deeply moving, it’s a masterful unpacking of the tensions, secrets, and bonds that hold a family together.

Hjorth parcels out the secrets with a precision worthy of Ibsen, so that the level of suspense is maintained up to the very last of the 343 pages.

Readers pining for a dose of brooding Norwegian writing in the style of Karl Ove Knausgaard may be drawn to this account of a woman's struggle to achieve reconciliation with a family that refuses to recognise she was the victim of abuse at the hands of her own father

Vigdis Hjorth’s new novel is furious and wise, trembling and stringent. Wills and Testaments examines who owns the past. This is the novel in weaponised form.

Its strong emotional truths take hold of you immediately – even before the family secret’s consequences are made apparent: I dogeared page after page to mark off insights, movements, formulations.

The strength of the novel lies in Bergljot’s convincing and continuing vulnerability, in her mixed feelings and her flaws … A clear-eyed and convincing story of a family’s doomed attempt to reconcile and the limits of forgiveness.

Vigdis Hjorth is one of my favorite contemporary writers.

Devastating

Will and Testament is a compulsively readable novel, one that turns questions of shame into weapons against silence.

Hjorth’s thoughtful, drily funny, and often devastating novel will leave a deep and lasting impression on readers.

Compelling ... Hjorth proves brilliant at revealing the stubborn, unredemptive quality of childhood suffering.

Even in the depths of family trauma, the scent of the forest, sea and meadow may still drift over the troubled cities and suburbs of Norwegian fiction. That forest may be a real place. It may also, as in Will and Testament, be a longed-for state of mind.

A powerfully humane novel about inheritance, trauma and the inheritance of trauma

An extraordinary storyteller

One of the year’s gems in translation was Will and Testament by Vigdis Hjorth, translated by Charlotte Barslund. A story of abuse, inheritance and the battle for the truth among a privileged Norwegian family, it grips like a vice while interrogating national as well as individual self-conception.

Unspooling in a splenetic torrent of raw emotional intensity, [Will and Testament] speaks to wider issues of collective traumas that societies refuse to confront.

Add Vigdis Hjorth to the growing list of writers of significant autofiction, reality literature whose characters depend on recognizable people and actual situations. Like Karl Ove Knausgaard’s monumental six volumes of the autobiographically inspired My Struggle and Elena Ferrante’s indelible four-volume Neapolitan series (beginning with My Brilliant Friend), Hjorth’s Will and Testament brilliantly examines the troubled life occasioned by recovered memories of a traumatic personal event.

A curious and very good short novel.

The political is never far from the raw psychic immediacy of Hjorth’s narrative...That Hjorth underpins her novel about the abandonment of psychical and familial security with this mention of social provision is no accident. In her writing, both psychoanalysis and a politics of the left are urgent and necessary.

An elegant yet excoriating study in negative space.