“To inherit or not to inherit, that is the question” for a woman who wants to make art, “as Virginia Woolf also thought,” the Norwegian novelist Vigdis Hjorth writes in her novel A House in Norway. The fictional narrator of Woolf’s essay “A Room of One’s Own” receives an inheritance of £500 a year from an aunt, giving her enough financial independence to write. Woolf, too, inherited £500 a year from her own aunt.
Questions of inheritance animate much of Hjorth’s work. Often, the inheritance is literal: The central character of A House in Norway (2014), the first of Hjorth’s novels to be translated into English, is an artist who makes her living by renting out an apartment in the house she purchased with inherited money, and her best known novel, Will and Testament (2016), is framed by a family dispute about who of four siblings should inherit a set of holiday cabins after their father’s death.
But these inheritances unfold into intangible questions about legacy and duty—A House in Norway probes the uneasy intimacy of landlord and tenant, asking what we owe to others and particularly to immigrants, and examining the struggle to see ourselves clearly through comforting national and personal myths. Will and Testament revolves around the revelation that one of the siblings, the narrator, was sexually abused by her father as a young girl, what this has done to her life and relationships, and how this trauma changes the network of debts and obligations among the members of the family. These are questions, for Hjorth, about the persistence of the past in the present, inheritance as a way of folding time back on itself.
The persistence of the past in the present is a classic Freudian preoccupation. In his essay “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through,” Freud wrote of the compulsive repetitions of people who have repressed memories, their continual turns back to the past. He wrote that the patient experiences these repetitions “as something real and contemporary,” but therapeutic work involves “tracing it back to the past.” This works, too, as a description of Hjorth’s writing style; her narrators are endlessly reflexive, and she structures her novels so that past and present often blur, creating what could be called a psychoanalytic rather than a linear sense of time.
Her latest book, fittingly, is called Repetition, translated into English by Charlotte Barslund (who has also translated five of Hjorth’s other works since 2017). In it, an older woman, a novelist who speaks on panels about “the relationship between the novel and real life,” attends a musical performance. There, seated next to a teenage girl who seems uncomfortable attending the event with her parents, the narrator is thrown back, like a patient on an analyst’s couch, into her own past. In Barslund’s translation, Hjorth’s prose is elegantly, claustrophobically interior; her books have a breathless quality, poised between a headlong plunge and a pressured pause, like having the wind knocked out of you by a blow to the chest. Barslund also carefully preserves a network of repetitions that spread across and between Hjorth’s books—phrases reappear nearly verbatim a handful of pages after they are first written; scenes repeat from one book to the next, ceramics are always being smashed. In Repetition, the relationship between repetition, memory, and writing becomes Hjorth’s explicit theme.
The book opens with what could be a description of the psychoanalytic method:
Anything you want to forget will come back to you, it will haunt you so vividly that it feels as if you’re going through it all over again ... you are forced to relive it. However, when it has been re-experienced and relived yet again, when the paralysing pain subsides, you will often find that you have gained a fresh insight into the significance of that particular memory; it was the reason it came back, in order to tell you something.
This, too, is a kind of inheritance. “Generations will follow the course of generations,” Hjorth writes, “and we are tied to our family from our first breath to our last.” What unfolds from there will be familiar to readers of Hjorth’s work (not least because Will and Testament describes a sequence of events identical to the plot in Repetition), but that is exactly her point.
Hjorth’s narrator recalls the November when she was 16 years old, living with her domineering father and anxious mother. As the girl grows, so does her mother’s anxiety; her fear is disproportionate to the girl’s behavior, somehow unnatural. In part to escape this stifling environment, the girl comes up with excuses to leave the house, attending parties with friends, and there, she meets a boy. She plans to lose her virginity to this boy, eagerly anticipating “the event you will never forget because no one ever forgets their first time.” She writes about it in her diary. So far, so conventional, as plots go, but the proximity of horror and normality is a preoccupying concern for Hjorth.
“When you’re sixteen and you have a boyfriend, then you do it,” Hjorth’s narrator explains, her desire more for that sense of normalcy than desire as such. And so, she goes to her boyfriend’s house, to another party, and follows him upstairs. What happens next is like a set piece out of a sex comedy—Hjorth is funnier than she’s often given credit for, perhaps because of the darkness of her subject matter. They undress and get into bed, and he gets on top of her and begins moving his hips. But she realizes something is wrong. “He moved his hips as men do during sex, except this wasn’t intercourse because he wasn’t inside me, I didn’t know much, but that much I did know. I whispered to him that he wasn’t inside me. Finn, you’re not inside me, but he didn’t seem to hear.” She whispers again and again but he doesn’t hear her and eventually he’s done, seemingly satisfied with his effort. Back downstairs, he puts an arm around her on the couch. Her narrator reports that he “whispered in my ear: Now I’ve made a woman of you.” “And” she writes, deadpan, “that’s how I became a woman.”
Jokes can, however, be a way of repressing terrible truths. Hjorth’s narrator was so looking forward to this event that “no one ever forgets” because she’s forgotten something. “Back then, of course, I didn’t know,” the narrator notes, “that I was living in a crime scene.” When Hjorth’s narrator gets home, she starts sobbing and, “as often when I couldn’t understand myself and I felt pain whose origin I couldn’t fathom because its strength was out of proportion to the situation I was in, I took out my diary to write.” Unable to bear the blankly expectant pages of the diary she’d written her hopes in only hours earlier, she begins to invent pages and pages about sleeping with Finn. “My first fiction,” the narrator calls it—here, Hjorth gives us the psychoanalytic method as a kind of Künstlerroman in reverse.
This first fiction, the narrator writes, “taught me a life lesson: fiction can have a greater impact than the truth, and be more truthful,” an observation characteristic of Hjorth’s work and similar to a point she often makes directly in interviews. The narrator’s fiction does in fact have a remarkable impact when her parents read what she’s written, and her father, horrified, takes off and is stumbling drunk when he returns late at night. The next morning, he asks the narrator whether she bled when she had sex. It’s a disturbing question, and it “planted a seed in me, it pointed me in the direction of my real trauma,” though it takes her years, still, to recover the memory of what happened to her when she was younger, the final revelation occasioned by another act of writing.
Her mother, in turn, “watered a seed which had already been planted” with her seemingly inexplicable anxiety—her mother’s own fictions. “I was unable to reassure her of my innocence, present and future,” the narrator writes, “she wanted to get under my clothes and under my skin and into my head in order to read my mind to learn what triggered her unbearable fear, but as that was impossible, she invented her own version of me instead. Her fear created me because fear and imagination go together.” Her mother’s fear is half fear that her daughter will confirm something she already suspects, half fear that she will reveal to the world the unspeakable truth of this family. The mother’s invention of a fictional version of her daughter ultimately points the narrator toward the place where secrets have been buried and repressed.
It is hard to write about Hjorth without writing about Freud. She writes about him herself, repeatedly; Will and Testament contains a careful reading of Civilization and Its Discontents. And the story that book tells is a perfect psychoanalytic case study: a repressed childhood memory, a family romance, dreams calling out for analysis. Bergljot, the narrator, has always had a sense that something was wrong with her and with her family, and, as she grows older, she becomes increasingly alienated from her distant, tyrannical father and her anxious, jealous mother; but the exact nature of the problem is unclear to her until she begins having a series of “strange, painful attacks” while writing a one-act play. After one of these episodes, she goes back to look at what she’s written and finds it all there, her past comes back to her on the page: “He touched me like a doctor, he touched me like a father.” She quickly gets herself into four-times-a-week psychoanalysis. When she learns that her father wants to will the family’s two holiday cabins to her younger sisters, leaving out her and her brother—the two siblings who acknowledge a darkness in the family—she decides it is time for an accounting. Literally: She reads a speech about her father’s abuse at a meeting with the family’s accountant.
Hjorth, 66, is a prolific writer with some 20 books to her name, and she writes primarily in two modes. She is alternately a novelist of social problems, as in A House in Norway and Long Live the Post Horn! (2012), in which a depressed PR rep finds meaning through working for Norway’s postal union, and a writer of what Norwegians call “reality literature” and we call autofiction, as in Will and Testament, Is Mother Dead (2020), If Only (2001), and, most recently, Repetition. In her autofiction, her protagonists are writers or artists. They often live, like Hjorth, in Oslo, raised, like Hjorth, in respectable Norwegian families. They, like Hjorth, have strained familial relationships, and are often, like Hjorth, divorced, having realized that, contrary to familial expectations, they did not want to be “a middle-class, bourgeois woman, married to a middle-class, bourgeois man,” as Hjorth said of her own first marriage. They tend to leave these relationships for a more bohemian, more cultured partner, often a married professor, sometimes echoing the mother character’s own affair.
The distance between Hjorth’s two modes is smaller than it seems. Alma, in A House in Norway, observes that “violence features most frequently in two types of societies: the small, close-knit and local, and the distant and loosely connected.” Hjorth is concerned, always, with power and violence and intimacy, and relationships in which all three tangle, whether between a landlord and their tenant, a nation and the countries it has colonized and oppressed, or a daughter and the father who abused her (“he was,” Bergljot says in one of the most devastating lines of Will and Testament, “just as much my dad as the others’.”).
Hjorth has called Will and Testament her most political novel; she has said it was inspired by her work with refugees, and it is shot through with discussion of global conflict, a double analysis of local and distant violence. The book caused a scandal in Norway—while Hjorth insisted that, despite its many parallels to her own life and family, it was a novel, her family responded to it as an accusation. They argued both that the novel was untrue and that it used familial communication verbatim, without permission. Like the family in the novel, they closed ranks against the force of Hjorth’s words. They argued, in public, that the novel borrowed too much from their lives; they threatened lawsuits. Her sister even wrote her own novel in response (Hjorth has called it a “revenge novel”) about the sister of a woman who makes fraudulent incest accusations. Their insistence on seeing themselves in the book, it must be said, somewhat deflates their own denials of its truth. In the books that have followed, Hjorth has often returned to the themes of the novel and those occasioned by its public reception; she continues to write about the inescapable traumas of childhood, familial estrangement and duty, the dynamics of memory, and the relationship between truth and fiction.
Her subsequent novel, Is Mother Dead, follows an artist named Johanna as she obsessively stalks her mother and harasses her sister, Ruth. Her family cut off contact with her after a series of perceived slights, including displaying pieces called Child and Mother I and II, which they take to be autobiographical, and failing to attend her father’s funeral. It is an achingly lonely, longing account of familial estrangement and derangement and a Freudian exegesis on the enduring influence of childhood (“If we knew, if we understood when we were young how crucial childhood is, no one would ever dare have children,” Johanna writes). It could be called a revenge novel of its own, with its pointed insistence that “the relationship of a work of art to reality is uninteresting, the work’s relationship to the truth is crucial.”
Just as the mother in Repetition invents her own version of her daughter, Johanna’s family is populated by projections. “I invent Ruth, that’s what’s so frightening,” Johanna observes in Is Mother Dead, “and Ruth invents me, and we both invent Mum.” For Hjorth, this is at the crux of the relationship between the novel and real life. Her novels might use real emails and text messages and the real program from her real father’s funeral (as one Norwegian newspaper demonstrated she did in Will and Testament). But we are all fictions, unknowable to one another and to ourselves; her characters are always trying to understand themselves and those around them and perennially revising their assessments. A novel can’t contain reality, because reality is never finished; it can’t even contain itself.
Instead, her work is unstintingly focused on what novels might offer instead. She is interested in how to live—with other people, with the weight of the past, with what you’ve done and what’s been done to you. It is one of the most remarkable, disquieting strengths of her work that she grants the abusive fathers and acquiescent mothers a deep humanity. “Poor Dad,” and “Poor Mum,” she calls them by turns, reflecting, with empathy they did not earn, on the moral wreckage of their lives.
It is a strength, too, that they are no less monstrous for their humanity. “It isn’t easy being human,” the father of Repetition’s narrator sobs, drunk and despairing after reading his daughter’s first fiction, exactly as Bergljot’s father says in Will and Testament. “The words my father spoke that November night in 1975 are perfectly true and the most beautiful I ever heard him say,” the narrator of Repetition says. It might well be an artist’s statement for Hjorth, another unsettling inheritance.
For regular Hjorth readers, the revelation of abuse in Repetition does not shock in the way it does in Will and Testament—and readers of many of Hjorth’s books may easily have guessed what has happened before the narrator reveals it (Is Mother Dead never quite reveals it, though there are references for those who already know). But shock isn’t the point; it isn’t necessary for Hjorth’s writing to feel revelatory. “Will you never let it go?” her narrator asks, rhetorically, toward the end of the novel—and this book does feel, at times, like a pointed rebuke to any critic who might complain about her returns to the same subject. “No,” she says, “I repeat and recall and relive and retell and redress because childhood lasts, youth lasts, our childhood and youth constitute a future that starts over constantly, it is an ongoing process.”