
Will and Testament
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Nano Nagle
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By:
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Vigdis Hjorth
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 PublishingListeners also enjoyed...




















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- 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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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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Repeat and repeat again
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