Publishers Weekly
07/08/2019
A long-suppressed family secret comes to light in Hjorth’s captivating, psychologically intense novel, a bestseller in her native Norway. Bergljot, a magazine editor living in Lier, Norway, is a mother to three adult children and no longer speaks to her own parents and younger siblings. But Bergljot and her brother Bård get back in touch after a conflict erupts over cabins their parents have willed only to their other children, Astrid and Åsa. Bård is seeking support from Bergljot, enraged by what he sees as an unfair division of inheritance. But Bergljot is less concerned with the cabins than with her family’s history of denial. When, 23 years earlier, she tried to tell her family about the abuse she suffered at the hands of her father, her mother “refused to believe,” and Bergljot became “an outcast who threatened the family honour.” Now, for the sake of justice and her own sanity, Bergljot decides she must try again to make her family acknowledge what happened. Bergljot emerges as a damaged but heroic figure; she drinks too much and is constantly on the phone with her children and her friend Klara, yet she is determined to forgive and to live a full life; “to be fundamentally unhappy, shaken and rattled to your core, and yet still experience moments of happiness.” Hjorth’s thoughtful, drily funny, and often devastating novel will leave a deep and lasting impression on readers. (Sept.)
From the Publisher
Longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature
Longlisted for the 2020 Best Translated Book Award for Fiction
Longlisted for The Millions Best Translated Book Awards for Fiction
“Like Knausgaard, Hjorth is writing against repression, against the taboo on telling things as they really are. But he urges us to look at dead bodies; she forces us to regard bleeding souls. Hjorth seems to have formulated from her experiments with living models a model for living, in which exposure—of the self and of others—serves a larger purpose.”
—New Yorker
“The cumulative effect is hypnotic. Hjorth works finely parsed and brilliant variations on her unrelenting theme of familial mistrust and misunderstanding.”
—New York Times
“Hypnotic.”
—John Williams, New York Times Book Review
“A powerfully humane novel about inheritance, trauma and the inheritance of trauma.”
—Times Literary Supplement
“This is 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.”
—Ben McPherson, Guardian
“In a ruthless yet patiently delivered work, Hjorth does something that few writers achieve: Will and Testament is both economical and overwhelming.”
—Elsa Court, Financial Times
“Will and Testament is a compulsively readable novel, one that turns questions of shame into weapons against silence.”
—Paris Review
“Hjorth’s thoughtful, drily funny, and often devastating novel will leave a deep and lasting impression on readers.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Devastating.”
—Frieze
“An extraordinary book.”
—Megan Nolan
"Vigdis Hjorth is one of my favorite contemporary writers."
—Sheila Heti, author of Motherhood and How Should a Person Be?
“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.”
—Holly Williams, Observer
“Compelling … Hjorth proves brilliant at revealing the stubborn, unredemptive quality of childhood suffering.”
—Lara Feigel, Guardian
“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.”
—Kirkus
“Hjorth parcels out the secrets with a precision worthy of Ibsen, so that the level of suspense is maintained up until the very last pages.”
—Aftenposten
“Furious and wise, trembling and stringent. Will and Testament examines who owns the past. This is the novel in weaponized form.”
—NRK
“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.”
—Dagens Nyheter
“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.”
—Boyd Tonkin, Norwegian Arts
“Precise, contemplative, and deeply moving, it’s a masterful unpacking of the tensions, secrets, and bonds that hold a family together.”
—Hannah Williams, Los Angeles Review of Books
“An extraordinary storyteller.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books
“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.”
—Ángel Gurría-Quintana, Financial Times (“Best Books of 2019: Fiction in Translation”)
“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.”
—Guardian (“Best Fiction of 2019”)
“Published to a storm of controversy in Vigdis Hjorth’s native Norway in 2016, Will and Testament arrived in English this year. The novel is a meticulously paced account of a property dispute that bleeds poisonously back into the history of the narrator and the family members whose squabbling over a cabin comes to seem darkly absurd compared with the trauma she has suffered.”
—Megan Nolan, New Statesman (“Books of the Year 2019”)
“Unsettling, beautifully constructed.”
—Observer
“Unspooling in a splenetic torrent of raw emotional intensity, [Will and Testament] speaks to wider issues of collective traumas that societies refuse to confront.”
—Morning Star
“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.”
—Robert Allen Papinchak, World Literature Today
“A curious and very good short novel.”
—Laura Waddell, Scotsman
DECEMBER 2019 - AudioFile
Nano Nagle delivers this story with confidence, helping to build tension and atmosphere. In modern-day Norway, Bergljot, long estranged from her family, starts to piece together her past and her struggle to be believed. What starts out as an apparent family feud over the inheritance of two lake cabins turns into something much darker. Nagle’s strong characterization ensures that the story is easy to follow despite its sometimes upsetting subject matter. Her skilled voicing of Norwegian names is the only clue that this audiobook is a translation into English. The result is an engaging, if sometimes challenging, listen. K.J.P. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2019-06-17
Prizewinning Norwegian novelist Hjorth (Talk To Me, 2010, etc.) mines an inheritance dispute among four siblings to delve into the burden of family secrets and the ripple effects of early childhood trauma.
Bergljot, a divorced writer with three grown children, cut off contact with her parents years ago and has no expectation of being included in their will. But when there's a dispute over two summer cabins, she sides with her brother and finds herself pulled back into the family she has worked desperately to escape. "The street of my childhood," a friend remarks, quoting a Danish poet, "is the root of my being." Her childlike mother and her younger sisters want to deny her early abuse by their domineering father; her brother has his own damage to contend with. "What was it like to be a normal human being?" she wonders. "I didn't know." The strength of the novel lies in Bergljot's convincing and continuing vulnerability, in her mixed feelings and her flaws. "The presence of my lost childhood, the constant return of this loss had made me who I was." She hates her mother for not being able to protect her but tries to feel compassion, even for her father. The drama heightens—there are confrontations, an overdose, a death, pleas for reconciliation, a sealed letter in a safe—but it's her desire to be believed and truly seen that drives the narrative forward. There are no easy resolutions here. Describing the night outside the pizzeria where she finally meets her mother again after years of estrangement, Bergljot says: "It was the kind of darkness that falls, the kind of darkness that flows and spreads, that penetrates buildings and houses and takes over no matter how many lights you turn on, no matter how many candles you put on the table and in the windowsills, no matter how many torches you light...a darkness full of knives."
A cleareyed and convincing story of a family's doomed attempt to reconcile and the limits of forgiveness.
