The question mark that’s missing from the title of Norwegian writer Vigdis Hjorth’s new novel hangs heavy over the text. Johanna, a successful artist in her fifties who’s estranged from her family, has returned to Oslo after three decades in America. For the majority of the book, the relation on whom Johanna fixates might best be understood as Schrödinger’s Mother: she’s both the woman constructed in her daughter’s mind and the woman who exists in real life. Whether these two figures bear any resemblance to each other… that’s the question.
One night, after a few glasses of wine, Johanna calls her mother. The older woman doesn’t pick up, and thus her daughter’s imagination goes into overdrive. Thirty years of silence leaves a lot of questions; it also turns once intimately familiar figures into “ghosts” who live “secret” lives inside each others’ minds.
We’re deep inside Johanna’s head for the overwhelming majority of the book, as she replays memories from her childhood and attempts—in turn—to get inside her mother’s own mind. The already near-suffocating sense of claustrophobia only escalates when Johanna takes to stalking her prey. She’s not above hiding in the bushes outside her mother’s apartment block or rifling through the old woman’s rubbish.
Hjorth’s examination of what happens when the real and the “mythical” mother collide is every bit as barbed as the book that first garnered her an international audience, Will and Testament—also translated by Charlotte Barslund—the story of a grown woman’s memories of being sexually abused by her father, which Hjorth’s real-life family took issue with.
Boldly refusing to settle for a narrative of forgiveness, Is Mother Dead is an increasingly shocking, unsettling novel about two people messily “tied together by pain and rage”.
