Is Mother Dead (2022) by Vigdis Hjorth

Book Review

Is Mother Dead (2022)

by Vigdis Hjorth

Translated by Charlotte Barslund

  This was a 2023 longlist title for the International Booker Prize. In the time it took me to get off the Libby waitlist for the Audiobook version, I went back and read her 2016 book about the impact of a recovered memory of child sex abuse has on a Norwegian family- Will and Testament.  I thought Will and Testament was very well written and completely disturbing in the way it treated recovered memory and its impact on child sex abuse, written from the point of view of the child victim as an adult.  I gather from online reviews and the anger of Hjorth's own family that Will and Testament was autofiction, and I'm assuming that this book is in the same category.

 It features a narrator/protagonist who seems like the same person as the narrator in Will and Testament: A woman who has purposefully estranged herself from the family.  Here, the narrator abandons legal studies and a boring lawyer husband in Norway for an American who teaches her how to paint.  It turns into a succesful career as a painter, but she never makes good with the family she left behind in Norway.  They split is compounded by the narrator's work, paintings that dwell on the painful relationship between family members.

  She returns to Norway for an upcoming career retrospective exhibit and begins to stalk her estranged mother- not sure how else you could put it.  Her obsession with reconciliation is the central and only theme in the book and you have to marvel at the fortitude of a novelist who could paint herself, essentially, in such a negative light.