Will and Testament
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Average rating3.8
Longlisted for the National Book Award Four siblings, two summer houses, one terrible secret—the “prickly, persuasive” bestseller from one of Norway’s most celebrated novelists, perfect for readers of Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgaard (New Yorker) “ . . . Hypnotic. Hjorth works finely parsed and brilliant variations on her unrelenting theme of familial mistrust and misunderstanding.” —New York Times 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 and father have decided to leave two island 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 and 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 and a cruel insult to the grievously injured. Will and Testament is a lyrical meditation on trauma and memory, as well as a furious account of a woman’s struggle to survive and be believed. Vigdis Hjorth’s novel became a controversial literary sensation in Norway and has been translated into twenty languages.
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[This book deals with child sexual and physical abuse.]
I'm a little surprised at how much this book affected me, and how much I enjoyed it, given that some of the content is pretty hard to take. It's just so well-written, and I'm guessing well-translated, that I couldn't put it down. It's got me thinking about the nature of truth, of family, of meaning in life. I'm going to seek out more books by Hjorth and hold out that more will get translations.
The author does an amazing job of taking you inside the mind of someone who is trying to get others to acknowledge her trauma, the circling and obsessiveness and paranoia. This realness is actually the downside of the book - it got repetitive, then tedious, then made me feel like I was having a breakdown. Skimming became necessary about 2/3 of the way through the book.
I felt really frustrated throughout that she kept talking about having cut off contact with her family while in actuality staying in constant contact with them. JUST FUCKING DO IT! By the end of the book I was sick of her inability to do the ONE thing that she had to do to help herself, and I was pretty sick of her in general.
Pros: the book gave me lots of food for thought, very good heavy stuff
Cons: we are inside the head of someone having a 30 year long mental breakdown, and the reader feels it
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