Mothers. Whether we know them or not, they leave an indelible mark upon our psyches. We suffer for them. We suffer because of them. Have you ever noticed that it's not quite the same for fathers?

Mothers. They are our best friends. They are our worst enemies. They are worrisome and entrap us in their anxious state. Who are these creatures to whom we feel called? What is it about the mere character of Mother that binds us so deeply to them?

Read my full review here: https://pencilnubbin.substack.com/p/review-no-5-is-mother-dead ( )

An interesting and unusual read. This book has one narrator, Johanna, who slowly lets the reader know her history as the book goes on. An interesting look at family, memory, self-discovery, bravery (and what it means), dysfunction, and secrets.

Johanna is 60ish, widowed, the mother of one son, himself now a married father. Johanna grew up in Norway, and has moved back. She is desperately trying to contact her mother and sister. She is stalking her mother, texting and calling, texting her sister. She is being firmly rebuffed by both. When a young law student and newly married, Johanna ran off to the US with another man. That is the man who left her widowed. Her immediate did not forgive her for this humiliation of 40 years previous--because it was always been about them.

As Johanna struggles with the continued rejection, being back in Norway helps her remember snippets from her childhood. Slowly the past and the full story comes into focus for the reader and Johanna herself. ( )

deeply moving
p 144 Soon I'll be going home to my true mother, the forest where I have made my nest. ( )

“The lie some people need to live can be the undoing of others.”

“I’m the prodigal daughter who has come home, but there is no one to welcome me, it’s my own fault. I came back to seek and she who seeks shall find, but not what she is looking for.”

“We all carry our mothers like a hole in our souls, small or big, living or dead, and . . . we try to fill these voids so that we can live . . . “

Hjorth’s novel is not long; the prose is accessible, natural-sounding, and evidently well translated. But, oh my, is it intense and claustrophobic. The reader is confined to the head of the main character and her obsessive ruminations on the subject of her estrangement from her mother. Thirty years ago, Norwegian-born visual artist Johanna Hauk fled her young marriage, her upright family, and her life as a law student for an American man who tutored her during a spring watercolour class. The reader is told early on that her family has never forgiven Johanna for rejecting them and for defying the rules and code of respectability they adhere to. Even more than that, Johanna has produced art, some of it controversial, focusing on the mother-and-child bond. The mother depicted in these works has the trademark flame-red hair of Johanna’s own mother. How could it not be a comment on her? The artist’s younger sister, the dutiful Ruth—who has never deviated from the script handed to her by Mum and Dad—has made it clear to Johanna that their mother was humiliated and appalled by these paintings. The daughter’s failure to return to Norway some years before for the funeral of her esteemed lawyer-father only rubbed more salt into the wound.

But, now . . . now Johanna is back in Norway. Her American partner, Mark, died a few years back, and the intensity of extreme grief has abated. Her son John, a musician in his late twenties, married with a son of his own, has relocated to Denmark where he performs in a Copenhagen orchestra. A large prestigious Norwegian gallery will soon be presenting a retrospective of Johanna’s work. All of these are reasons why she is back in her homeland, but they aren’t the main one. For her, the real issue is to finally make contact with her mother, whom she believes is being controlled and kept from her by Ruth. Is this a fact or a manifestation of paranoia? The reader cannot be sure. The early pages of the novel focus on Johanna’s efforts to reach her mother by text, phone, and email. Initially, she does not know why she’s driven to do so and feels ashamed of making these impulsive phone calls. “On an existential level,” she thinks, “I do have something to tell her although I can’t find the words and don’t know what it is yet. It doesn’t belong in the rational sphere.” A friend has told Johanna that her family is aware that she’s back in Oslo, but “Mum” responds to none of her estranged daughter’s attempts at communication. Ruth, however, sends terse messages to her sister that their mother wants nothing to do with her.

Being rebuffed only spurs Johanna on. “Information we can’t access is tantalizing,” she observes. She regularly stakes out her mother’s flat, she stalks her mother and sister, she even sorts through her mother’s trash for clues about her life, and at one point she enters her parent’s apartment building, pleading with her mother to remove the safety chain to allow her in. The reader can’t help but wonder if Johanna isn’t completely deranged. If her actions are pathologically repetitious, however, her thoughts range more widely. Personal details about the artist’s and her mother’s lives—memories—well up. Johanna’s goals as an artist and her understanding of what her work means also emerge. In time, she recovers a repressed memory of having (literally) buried an object which may offer the answer to what has fuelled the estrangement between the two women. Retrieving that object and confirming a detail about her mother’s physical appearance becomes the goal.

I found Is Mother Dead to be a compelling work of psychological fiction. It put me in mind of Jessica Au’s Cold Enough for Snow, a quite different novel which also considers the mother-daughter relationship. In that book, the daughter-narrator, who is ambivalent about having children, reflects: “if I had a daughter, she would live partly because of the way I had lived, and her memories would be my memories, and she would have no choice in that matter.” Hjorth takes this idea and runs with it. “If we knew, if we understood when we were young how crucial childhood is, no one would dare have children,” pronounces her protagonist. This novel is an exploration of the way in which a mother’s life, psychology, and pain cannot help but impact the daughter and ripple down the generations. ( )

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A cat and mouse game of surveillance and psychological torment develops between a middle-aged artist and her aging mother, as Vigdis Hjorth returns to the themes of her controversial modern classic, Will and Testament.

'To mother is to murder, or close enough', thinks Johanna, as she looks at the spelling of the two words in Norwegian. She's recently widowed and back in Oslo after a long absence as she prepares for a retrospective of her art. The subject of her work is motherhood and some of her more controversial paintings have brought about a dramatic rift between parent and child. This new proximity, after decades of acrimonious absence, set both women on edge, and before too long Johanna finds her mother stalking her thoughts, and Johanna starts stalking her mother's house.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Twenty-ish books is a damned fine career. Author Hjorth and Translator Barslund are quite a team of creators, bringing this still-expanding storyverse from Norway to the US English-language market. They do it skillfully...and they do it, thankfully, quite often.

"Do I confront my deepest self?" asks Johanna, our narrator, in a passage that honestly sums up the entire experience of reading Author Hjorth's writing. She is in a deep personal crisis, reaching out to her long-estranged mother after decades of ill will that she caused with her art. Paintings Johanna created caused her mother, as well as her sister, to see things that family amnesia demanded be kept silent. Johanna was, and still is, unwilling to be silent. She has reached her sixties, though, a time in life when time itself looks and feels very, very different than it does even five or six years prior. Building bridges between ourselves and those responsible for our present-day being can, in many families, present challenges that feel insurmountable.

Johanna, as a visual person, sees her aging self as partly her mother "...on whose model my body is being shaped, as if I were clay contained in a form." She is facing mortality, and seeing how morality is molded within our relatively short-term bodily accommodation. She is finally reckoning with her mother's and her sister's deep sense of betrayal at her hands...while never believing she was wrong, she recognizes at last that they are hurt. As Johanna thinks through her complicated life, she muses on the natural surroundings her Norwegian home is in; any time she says, in that context, anything about "Mother" I wonder if she's talking about her mother, or OUR Mother-the-Earth...and these moment of being Mothered in nature are so sharply contrasted to her family-mother's unhappiness-making unmotherly ways.

But at such a cost to her own mental health...she obsesses about the family she broke, and did that deliberately, then ran away from the consequences for half her life. The author's formatting, daunting looking as it is, actually serves as a strong support for the story. Johanna is in the throes of a crisis. She doesn't think like a normal person. She is quite simply disintegrating into the pieces she reassembled through her art. The pages are designed to make concrete what could be lost in any other design choice.

But if the daughter sees her future in looking into the mirror of her mother, that mother sees a past that failed her in important ways, and sees herself and her failures writ live and large. Johanna's mother's rancor and rage aren't going to go away, and she (and her other daughter) have had decades to "get their story straight" as it were. The entrenched narratives of hurt on both sides bode ill for a meeting of the minds....

This beautifully written and translated book serves as a reminder to us all that we don't get to be victims all by ourselves. All damage done is reciprocal, and there is no escape from retribution. Self-delivered retribution, most commonly of all.

It's not a perfect book, as none ever can be. I rate it four of five stars because it's not a long book but it is a repetitive one. We hear the entire story in Johanna's internal voice. It's an excellent way to convey the dark night of the soul, the anger and hurt of betrayal...from one side. It takes a bit of work to contextualize the non-standard layout. It is worth the effort, in my never-humble opinion, but be prepared for it.

I recommend this latest salvo from Vigdis Hjorth's seemingly bottomless well of personal fiction to you, all the daughters and all the mothers and all the siblings whose home lives weren't always the happy-clappy-sappy greeting-card kind. Accept Vigdis Hjorth's gift of seeing yourself in her mixed, complicated feelings in this storyverse. ( )