The Mookse and the Gripes discussion

Is Mother Dead by Vigdis Hjorth, translated by Charlotte Barslund

this one made me feel so anxious

I've had this one on hold from the library for months, still waiting for it to come in but can't wait to read it.

I love the real-world background to this.

When Vigdis Hjorth's Arv og miljø (translated as Will and Testament) was published in Norway there was considerable debate as to whether the work, which Hjorth claimed as fictional, may actually be factual, or at least hinting at this, since many details of the character's story mirror Hjorth's own.

And given said character claims her father sexually abused her as a child that led to quite some reaction.

In a bizarre twist, the author's real-life sister, Helga, recognising herself in the sister-character, wrote her own counter novel Fri vilje, as explained in The New Yorker: "In Helga’s novel, a family is torn apart when the narrator’s histrionic writer sibling makes false allegations of incest in one of her books." And as The Guardian explained Hjorth’s mother, Inger, "threatened legal action against a theatre in Bergen, which staged an adaptation of Will and Testament."

Which makes for interesting context to this novel since, while less directly auto-biographical, the novel centres around an artist whose work caused a major rift with her mother and sister!

wow, thanks for that background! really makes me think more about how the mother and sister characters were portrayed

This is a book I really enjoyed.
The observations about family and motherhood are chillingly accurate as well as being something most of us would never dare to voice. Absolutely loved this quote from the main character Johanna, after she has deserted her husband, family and career for an art teacher and a new life as an artist:

"I wrote them a long letter at the time to explain why I had done what I had done, I poured out my heart in that letter, but the short reply I received was as if I hadn’t written to them in the first place. A short, blunt reply with threats of ostracism, but stating that if I ‘came to my senses’ and returned home immediately, I might be forgiven. They wrote as if I were a child and they my guardians. They reeled off what it had cost them financially and emotionally to bring me up, I owed them quite a lot. They meant, I understood, that I was literally indebted to them. They seriously believed that I would give up my love and my work because they had paid for tennis lessons when I was a teenager."

Yes well put and that quote features in my review as well - I love the They seriously believed that I would give up my love and my work because they had paid for tennis lessons when I was a teenager.

I also liked the way though that in reality Johanna's biggest issue is that her mother has moved on and essentially put Johanna in her past.

I’ve come to terms with losing my mum, but I can’t come to terms with Mum coming to terms with losing her daughter.

This would be a very worthy winner albeit I wonder if it would be seen as too 'domestic' as a prize winner.

Isn’t only happy domestic novels that bore people? Mother and daughter hating each other makes for a good story.

I'm liking this one so far but the frame of the story sounded vaguely familiar until I read Paul's post above. It does cover similar ground to Hjorth's previous novel - this time medium being painting instead of literature. Not that I mind though, it's written exquisitely.

At least in the UK this seems an odd weekend to read this book.

This book had an intense, claustrophobic feel for me.

I was chatting to other readers about the translation, which felt odd in parts, but some see this as deliberate play on language.

Jen Campbell discusses this here (33:42 onwards):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHGHg...

Excerpt from the above video:

"At the very beginning, the first sentence is one that plays around with tenses in an interesting way:

"She would contact me if Mum died. She has to, hastn't she?"

And you can see it switches tenses there.

When I first read that sentence I tripped over it and thought, was this a bad translation? But then I realised she is playing around with tenses and that is a lot of fun to me."

Readers of the Swedish translation confirm that the blending of tenses is evident in the Swedish version too.

Campbell also discusses the many sentences with commas (which conventionally would be semicolons or full stops), indicating the way the narrator is forcing together separate trains of thought.

I can see the appeal with this one. Very well written and translated. I like the themes explored and it’s disturbing in all the right ways. I’m struggling with the overall message, though. I’m not sure what we’re meant to take away from it. In a normal year, I wouldn’t put this on the shortlist.

David wrote: "...I like the themes explored and it’s disturbing in all the right ways. I’m struggling with the overall message, though. I’m not sure what we’re meant to take away from it."

I like the phrase, 'disturbing in all the right ways'! :)

I'm not sure it would make my shortlist either, but some thematic takeaways for me were:

1. Family binds us in a mythological manner that cannot be undone, particularly the mother-child bond:

“All children depend on their mother for their survival and will, as a result, be forever vulnerable to her, body and soul.”

2. Our early childhood experiences are unshakeable, and cannot be altered or reworked with the passage of time:

“Those years have marked me, they won’t have been reduced to ashes, they can’t be dismissed, what I experienced then, especially in my early years.”

“It’s understandable that parents, once they are older and wiser, want their children to look at them afresh. But no one can expect or demand of the children that they forget the image of their mother as they experienced her in their childhood or that they erase the image of their mother created over the first thirty years of their life and instead see her objectively as a seventy or eighty-year-old.”

3. The book also comments on art (painting, writing, other), and how it parses reality:

“The relationship of a work of art to reality is uninteresting, the work’s relationship to the truth is crucial; the true value of the work doesn’t lie in its relationship to a so-called reality, but in its effect on the observer.”

That’s a great point Nathan. Part of it might be the expectation we have that a mother’s love is unconditional. This can be read as a mourning for the loss of that.

I can’t say I enjoyed this book much, but it’s the one I admire the most so far.
It felt the most complete of all the books, like an assigned read for a college class- there were multiple themes to explore (see But_I_thought_’s well thought out comments above), and the ending was as satisfying as it could be.
And I love an unhinged, unreliable narrator/main character.

My video review: https://youtu.be/v1tyV8qjBos

Tracy wrote: "I can’t say I enjoyed this book much, but it’s the one I admire the most so far.
It felt the most complete of all the books, like an assigned read for a college class- there were multiple themes t..."

Which, of course, is why Slimani and co. dumped it...

Tony wrote: "Tracy wrote: "I can’t say I enjoyed this book much, but it’s the one I admire the most so far.
It felt the most complete of all the books, like an assigned read for a college class- there were mul..."

Yup.