Is Mother Dead

Is Mother Dead is a Norwegian domestic thriller about the lengths to which people will go to dig up truths that others want to stay buried.

Hjorth has written a fascinating tale about the Norwegian postal system and composed a best-selling work of autofiction...In her latest work to appear in English, an ex-pat artist returns to Norway to oversee a retrospective of her work and attempts to contact, and then stalks, her estranged mother

Vigdis Hjorth is a major hero of mine. When my friend Sheila Heti told me to read A House in Norway, my life was changed. I've since recommended her work to so many people, who love it just as passionately. Hjorth has tapped into the novel in a way I have not seen or experienced since Woolf, Kafka, and Bernhard.

A master of familial estrangement and obsession, Hjorth tells the story of Johanna, an artist living abroad who returns to Oslo for a retrospective of her work. After initial attempts to get in touch with her estranged mother fail, she begins stalking her, hiding out in her building and rummaging through her trash. Hjorth's piercing writing captures the torment and mania that roils under the surface of most all of us.

Beautiful in its ability to match effect with intention and in its descriptive powers.

Is Mother Dead overflows with contrasts in both its structure and its language. Some sections are stark and only a line or two long; other sentences are long and winding, helping to demonstrate the narrator's conflicted perspectives on art, family, and her own fraught relationship with her relatives. [An] immersive trip into the protagonist's mind - and the difficult decisions she has to reckon with.

Hjorth captures the minds inner dialogue...with almost nauseating precision.

The realities of growing up with a mother who consumed you, who poured her insecurities into her young daughter, is an experience I have never before seen so ruthlessly examined.

Writing with a rush of anxious interiority beautifully reproduced by Barslund's translation, Hjorth spins out Joanna's hopes, fears, and half-suppressed memories in obsessive and propulsive run-on sentences, full of self-reflexive questions and crushing doubt...Is Mother Dead both pulls readers into Joanna's adventure and calls on them to become more alive to their own task, their arms stretching upward for the next rung.

[A] harrowing and propulsive novel about the strained tether between daughters and mothers...lucidly translated by Charlotte Barslund. Hjorth deftly conveys the psychological warfare of familial conflict in circuitous, searching sentences. Fragments replicate the stab of betrayal, run-ons rummage for truth amid lies.

A thorough and anxious exploration of motherhood and childhood.

Hjorth has masterfully written a family drama where no reunion takes place and a thriller where no blood is shed.

[Is Mother Dead] feels liberating. In the struggle to break free...from our abusers and our own pain, there can be, in a hand as deft as Hjorth's, an energy both creative and destructive.

A troubling and stunningly accomplished excavation into the past.

Hjorth traverses Johanna's emotional exile, the ruthless censorship within her family's stories, and the language of art, in which the narrator takes solace.

Bizarre yet totally mesmerising.

Both mother and daughter are paralysed - despite their attempts to slip the bonds of their relationship, neither can escape...This kind of 'merciless intimacy' is Hjorth's natural terrain.

Is Mother Dead confirms Hjorth's place as an unparalleled chronicler of the fault lines in intimate relationships.

Covering raw and prescient themes, Is Mother Dead is a rich but unsettling read.

Brilliantly claustrophobic, this novel is a testament to the fact that, when the present becomes the past, we are only left with our own version of what happened.

The Norwegian novelist Hjorth is something of a specialist in mordant, exacting depictions of familial estrangement; her latest novel, translated by Charlotte Barslund, recounts the increasingly obsessive efforts by a middle-aged painter to reunite with her mother, whom she has not spoken to for decades.

Boldly refusing to settle for a narrative of forgiveness, Is Mother Dead is an increasingly shocking, unsettling novel.

Rich and insular.

An absorbing study of inner turmoil ... gripping.

Hjorth is an intoxicating writer who manages to somehow infuse her fictional wanderings with a strong underpinning of personal truths. We feel her presence always lurking beneath Johanna. And we understand how much still remains unsaid.

A profound, uncomfortable and ultimately beautiful exploration of the first human relationship.