Will and Testament (Arv og miljø)
Vigdis Hjorth, Charlotte Barslund (translation)When a dispute over her parents' will grows bitter, Bergljot is drawn back into the orbit of the family she fled twenty years before. Her mother & father have decided to leave two & summer houses to her sisters, disinheriting the two eldest siblings from the most meaningful part of the estate. To outsiders, it is a quarrel about property & favoritism. But Bergljot, who has borne a horrible secret since childhood, understands the gesture as something very different – a final attempt to suppress the truth & a cruel insult to the grievously injured.
Will & Testament is a lyrical meditation on trauma & memory, as well as a furious account of a woman's struggle to survive & be believed. Vigdis Hjorth's novel became a controversial literary sensation in Norway & has been translated into 20 languages.
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Add Vigdis Hjorth to the growing list of writers of significant autofiction, reality literature whose characters depend on recognizable people & actual situations. Like Karl Ove Knausgaard’s monumental 6 volumes of the autobiographically inspired My Struggle & Elena Ferrante’s indelible four-volume Neapolitan series (beginning with My Brilliant Friend), Hjorth’s Will & Testament brilliantly examines the troubled life occasioned by recovered memories of a traumatic personal event. – Robert Allen Papinchak, World Literature Today
Vigdis Hjorth is the author of 12+ prize-winning & best-selling novels. Will & Testament sold 170,000 copies in Norway & has received several awards, including the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature & the Norwegian Booksellers’ Prize, as well as being nominated for the National Book Award & Nordic Council Literature Prize. Long Live the Post Horn! won the Believer Book Award for fiction in 2020, & Is Mother Dead was listed for the International Booker Prize in 2023.