Book Specs 📖

• Author: Vigdis Hjorth
• Translator: Charlotte Barslund
• Genre: Literary Fiction / Contemporary Psychological Fiction
• Publisher: Verso
• Pages: 134

One Sentence Synopsis🔖

An author attends a symphony in Oslo and an unexpected event causes her to relive the repressed traumas of her youth almost five decades earlier at age 16.

Notes/Thoughts📝

• This one was LOUD and also the first time I’ve read Hjorth. Nordic lit has become one of my favourite domains for translated literature. There is something quietly alluring but deeply haunting about stories from this part of the world. What seems like a harmless dangling seam becomes the start of a series of undoings, until the whole of human nature is revealed. THEY ARE SO GOOD AT THIS!! This isn’t the first book I’ve read about irresponsible parents. Books like Crying in H Mart, I Wish My Mom Died, Transcendent Kingdom all express the same sentiment – the burden that kids carry when parents are unable to provide the foundation of love and care that they are supposed to. Repetition was cool because you feel the rhythm of repetitive thoughts and patterns throughout the book, the cycle of dread, rumination, and endless circuits (or short circuits). The bold assertion that we cannot ever truly be free from our childhoods is interesting. On the surface it is a depressing statement but what makes it liberating is that we should not ignore it. What makes the cycle perpetual is fear. What I think Hjorth is trying to say is, listen to your repetitions, the things you keep coming back to. Bear the pain of diving back in and listen to what your body and mind is telling you – it is in returning that you help your inner child. And once you can do that the repetition you can still carry the memory but it no longer prevents you from living in the present.
• Scared of being scared – Imagine trying to avoid an entire emotion because it is inconvenient for your parent. Downstream impacts of not being able to detect fear are part of the human survival kit. Through the protagonist’s psychological wanderings you can see how vital it is to express and recognize your emotions and what happens when we negate our own needs. Spoiler: it fucks you up as an adult
• Hyper-vigilance is a necessary physical response to danger but constant and continuous hyper vigilance sucks up the resources, especially as a child, to be able to socialize, learn etc. Instead of growing up the child observes things from a distance, and soon it’s difficult to not feel like an outsider when they become adults.
• When I hear about victims of sexual abuse that expose their perpetrators decades later, I am shocked at the amount of criticisms on why victims took so long to do something. Of course there are opportunists, but fervent protests about how long it should take to process trauma is a greater dialogue about the ignorance of how trauma works. Trauma is tightly entwined with person’s identity, especially in the formative years when a human is developing their sense of self. To objectively look at this part of yourself, process what actually happened, have the courage to speak about it, is a vulnerable process that requires you to expose the ugly parts of YOUR life again (and expose all the bystanders that did nothing). The victim carries not only their own shame/guilt of their mind/body, but of their family/community.
• The protagonist is right to believe that her parents withheld the “keys to happiness”. However there are also parents, although coming in with the best intentions, don’t have the keys themselves to happiness. The cycles of trauma continue until you stop following the same repetitions and start a new, healthier one instead. It is estimated it takes 3-4 generations to cleanse a family of trauma, and that’s if you ever do get out!

“Quotes”🗣

“Anything you want to forget will come back to you, it will haunt you so vividly that if feels as if you’re going through it all over again…”When it has been re-experienced and relived yet again, when the paralyzing pain subsides, you will often find that you have gained a fresh insight into the significance of that particular memory; it was the reason it came back, in order to tell you something. “

“…would I always feel excluded from everthing that was natural, from everything that was easy?”

“It ran and it dripped and it spurted, it was as cathartic as throwing up, as restorative as throwing up, I wrote and I wrote, i filled my enormous void with words.

“Something impossible welled up in me, I pushed it back. I didn’t and I couldn’t acknowledge whatever it was that was threatening to rise up inside me because I knew I wouldn’t be able to cope with it or handle it, I had a strong hunch that it would kill me and so I fought it. Mortal combat was taking place inside me, I was a battlefield.”

I couldn’t bear the pain and the knowledge that I depended on and was controlled by those who inflicted the pain.

“…fiction can have a greater impact than the truth, and be more truthful.”

“Will you never let it go? No. I repeat and recall and relive and retell and redress because childhood lasts, youth lasts, our childhood and youth constitute a future that starts over constantly, it is an ongoing process.”

“…the body remembers and suffers and thinks, the body knows, it is not just the mind.”

“…she had been calling out to me for decades: Talk to me! Comfort me! Offer me your hand of salvation, throw me a lifeline, pull me up! I didn’t hear her calls, her desperate pleas then, but I hear them now, they echo in my brain and they won’t ever stop.”

“There is a grief, an experience of pain which is also shameful, they chased me away and then they blamed me for leaving.”

“…this is not a point on a line or a circle, but a moment, deep, rich, infinite and complex.