Vigdis Hjorth; translated by Charlotte Barslund
Will and Testament by Vigdis Hjorth, translated by Charlotte Barslund, is the first-person narrative of Bergljot, a woman in her fifties who has been estranged from her family for over two decades. An inheritance dispute and the death of her father forces Bergljot to interact with her family. Every interaction with them dredges up memories of the past as Bergljot struggles to understand her family’s choice of denying the truth of her childhood trauma. The nature of the trauma is alluded to but not explicitly stated until Bergljot confronts her family in an open letter after her father’s death.
Bergljot was sexually assaulted by her father when she was a child. The assault started when she was five years old and continued for two years. Although she suppressed the memory for many years, it continued to surface in fragments. She was eventually able to piece it together when she was in her twenties and revealed the assault to her family. They reacted to the accusation with virulent hostility. They doubted her, accused her of ingratitude, of having a wild imagination, of behaving aggressively to get attention. They did everything they could to deny her the satisfaction of believing her, effectively pushing her away to silence her. Their denial is a continual source of Bergljot’s frustration.
The narrative unfolds in a series of flashbacks and vignettes. Threaded throughout is Bergljot’s raw anger toward her family and her desperate attempts to understand why they denied her truth. She sends angry emails to her sister and then apologizes for them. She shares her frustrations with her husband, children, and friends. Each email or phone call from her mother or sister sends her plummeting into a vortex of anxiety and self-analysis. She narrates her dreams. She cites the words of Freud, Jung, her therapist, various artists, and friends in an effort to understand how childhood trauma has impacted her and why its revelation impacted her family in the way it did. The movement is circular, always rotating around the same issues—why did it happen and why are they denying my truth?
Whether it is based on the author’s real life as some have suggested, or whether it is a work of fiction as the author claims it to be, this is a powerful novel illustrating the devastating impact of childhood sexual assault on a victim whose truth has been denied. Unfortunately, it suffers from poor editing and punctuation. It is littered with fused sentences, comma splices, and repetitive sentences. This may be a fault of the translation. Or it may be an effort to reflect the narrator’s trauma as she circles around events, fuses sentences, or repeats them. Either way, it detracts from an otherwise powerful story.
In spite of this, the novel is recommended for its exploration of sibling rivalry, parental favoritism, the impact of childhood trauma, and the sacrifices and choices victims and their families make when egregious wrongdoing cannot be proved.