Will and Testament Audiobook By Vigdis Hjorth cover art

Will and Testament

A Novel

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Will and Testament

By: Vigdis Hjorth
Narrated by: Nano Nagle
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A controversial best seller from one of Norway’s most intelligent and highly-regarded novelists

When a dispute over her parents’ will grows bitter, Bergljot is drawn back into the orbit of the family she fled 20 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.

©2019 Vigdis Hjorth (P)2019 Blackstone Publishing Absurdist Family Life Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Women's Fiction

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Will and Testament begins as an inheritance dispute over two vacation cabins, and methodically progresses to the real subject: the protagonist’s childhood sexual abuse by her father and her family’s denial of it. Both the prose and the performance are flat, which is fitting: abuse victims suffer from “flat affect” because of their trauma. It wasn’t an easy listen, but I found it compelling.

An Illuminating Read

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Narration is great. Style of writing is unusual and at times a bit belaboring but it’s a well-written story about a very difficult subject matter. It’s hard to recommend a book like this because it’s not exactly enjoyable though it is a compelling perspective to get a glimpse of.

Well written but difficult subject matter

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I liked the honesty, and how she demonstrated the way her childhood sexual abuse affected her social development and adult behavior. Also how it affected her relationship with family members. As a survivor of sexual abuse myself I appreciate the courage to speak out about it, as my sexual abuse has made me ashamed and afraid to share myself with the world.

A deep Dive into the psyche of a sexual abuse survivor and her family

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For now I will simply make a couple notes on issues other than the main theme:

- my favourite publisher, Verso, did a bad job with the copy on this one. In multiple places I found myself correcting the incorrect word choices that made no sense. they meant to write "fell" but they published "feel" etc etc. the syntax generally was often difficult to process in the print edition. without using a hybrid print/audiobook reading method i might not have enjoyed it as much

- the author makes repeated recourse to israel as some kind of analogue to the power dynamics of her family conflict. she seems to think she is saying something profound. yet while she demands to be taken seriously, for her suffering to be acknowledged and then, coherently, for those who acknowledge her suffering to take appropriate action in favour of justice - the author does not do the same with israel. she intimates that she has taken a position in favour of justice, but never makes it explicit and therefore, in fact, never does. the closest parallel in her own book of her treatment of the israel question is her sister Astrid's treatment of her. "she shows how much she has practised being a good and sensible human being, a kind of officially good person.... she knows that [Palestine] is telling the truth, but if she were to acknowledge it, accept it, there would be consequences, and she's incapable of dealing with them." as a result, the image that comes across is that tel aviv is a wonderful place, and we should wring our hands because something unidentified and unrecognised is wrong with Gaza and some refugees being so close to it. near the end the author pulls away from her Balkans and Israel analogies and moves the parallel to Ireland. But what this choice might represent isn't even hinted at. Thus, despite the great impact this book had on me, it must be stated that the difficulty of genocide is not that both perpetrator and victim claim they are the victim. Her mother and sister rhetorically usurped her rightful role as victim to avoid acknowledgement and reparation, and by not embodying that more resolutely in her text - that Israel does the same to the Palestinians - the author ends up replicating the moral failure of her family on a geopolitical scale.

a marvelous book - with some quibbles

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I struggled with this one.
The writing style was annoying with so many repeats of the same sentence and words.
I pushed through hoping it will get better but it didn't and then it stopped so abruptly I'm still confused.
Narration was okay.

Tedious!

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The character kept repeating herself over and over and over. It was really hard to listen to.

Repeat and repeat again

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