Will and Testament (Verso Fiction)

I didn't really like the book, yet I got caught in it somehow. The plot is almost non existent, nothing really happens and when it does, nothing really changes as a consequence. So I guess curiosity led me to finish it, I wanted to see what happens. The reader is stuck in the protagonist's mind which is the only place where something is actually going on. Some characters are really irritating, which was probably the writer's aim to depict them as this, but they feel more like puppets than real people. So all in all I don't value this reading much.

It could have been told in three paragraphs.Awful, repetitive. I actually persevered for 40% of the text then could not bother any more. There was no suspense because it was clear what had happened. Such bad, repetitive writing was disrespectful to victims of such horrors.

A must read

Vigdis Hjorth's novel focuses on Bergljot, a middle-aged Norwegian woman and one of four siblings, who has alienated herself from her family due to traumatic events from the past. When her father suddenly dies and it is revealed that the family's two summer cabins have been left to Bergljot's two younger sisters and that she and her brother have more or less been overlooked, Bergljot finds herself drawn into an unwanted situation with her sisters and her mother. Due to intense ill-feeling between Bergljot and her father, she is torn between wanting nothing further to do with him and making him pay for his treatment of her, and now that the unfairness of his will has been revealed and the fact that her father's hostility has extended to her brother, Bergljot now feels that the time has come for her to confront her mother and her two sisters with the whole truth about her father, about how he'd always tried to suppress events from their past life and why she has been forced to alienate herself from the family. However, how far is Bergljot prepared to go? And will her sisters really believe what she has to say?An intense and claustrophobic story which looks at abuse of power, betrayal, jealousy, suppression and more. The author (who, I understand, drew on her own family history for parts of this novel) writes convincingly of how how trauma can affect the victim and of how the damage inflicted when their revelations are not believed, can be as distressing as the event which caused the initial trauma. So, not an easy read and certainly not a comfortable one, but a compelling story and one that perhaps the author needed to tell.

Absolutely riveting. Everyone knows someone who is affected by child abuse in families and the complex reactions to it from other family members. Often they deny it could have happened because it didn’t happen to them, and they accuse the victim of lying. Leading to spectacular family fallouts that estrange future generations.