Today we’re reading Vigdis Hjorth’s Is Mother Dead, translated by Charlotte Barslund and published by Verso in 2022.
I read Is Mother Dead in February. Though I had been looking forward to reading it for months, I didn’t necessarily expect much—I thought I’d like it, put it down, and be done with it. That was my reaction to reading Long Live the Post Horn! a couple of years ago, after all.
But this novel really caught me off guard. Almost six months later, I’m still thinking about it enough to attempt to write about it (or rather, to tie up all the pieces I’ve written over the last six months). I mean, it was long-listed for the International Booker Prize, and Hjorth is a much-lauded Norwegian author, so clearly I’m not alone in my praise.
Looking back on the books I’ve called “favorites” over the past year (or at least books I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about), I’ve noticed a theme: fraught familial relationships. Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Baker and The Furies by Janet Hobhouse are the two that immediately pop into my mind, and I’ve just recently finished Banyan Moon by Thao Thai.
The way these life-forming relationships with parents and siblings affect us creates a well of material for writers. And no matter how much time we spend reflecting on the past, it never seems to give us the answer we’re looking for about ourselves.
Anyways, Is Mother Dead gave me yet another chance to dip into the well.
Synopsis
'To mother is to murder, or close enough', thinks Johanna, as she looks at the spelling of the two words in Norwegian. She's recently widowed and back in Oslo after a long absence as she prepares for a retrospective of her art. The subject of her work is motherhood and some of her more controversial paintings have brought about a dramatic rift between parent and child. This new proximity, after decades of acrimonious absence, set both women on edge, and before too long Johanna finds her mother stalking her thoughts, and Johanna starts stalking her mother's house. (Verso)
“a mother can never be an ordinary human being to her children, and I am one of her children”
As a child (a human born of another human), it’s easy to get stuck in the mindset that I am the child, and They are the parent, therefore, my feelings are valid and their feelings are invalid.
It’s a selfish and immature approach to any kind of relationship, but it is, I think, a very normal child-parent relationship when you’re young (speaking from a specific Western point of view, of course). Part of growing into adulthood is re-constituting that relationship with your parents, and learning to—essentially—treat them as human. You learn to empathize with them; you learn about their shortcomings from a place of understanding rather than anger; you learn how to forgive them; you learn how to see them as people.
One of the most important parts of this process, and maybe one of the most difficult, is letting go of your own hurt and self-centeredness as the “child” in the relationship. It’s not easy to recognize (or take responsibility for) how you played a part in any fracturing of that relationship.
I still really struggle with this adult-child/parent relationship dynamic and all of the leftover feelings from childhood. I want to hold on to my own story of how things were.
And so does the narrator of Is Mother Dead.
Johanna is a woman in her sixties; an artist, a mother, and now a widow. She returns to her hometown after almost 30 years without contact with her family. She wants to repair her relationship with her mother, and assumes the yearning she feels must be secretly reciprocated.
So she begins to stalk her mother (sitting outside of her home, digging through her trash bins), in an attempt to get in touch with her, despite every sign that her mother does not, in fact, want anything to do with her.
The novel takes place almost exclusively in Johanna’s head, as she ruminates, dwells, and revisits memories.
She believes the dissolution of her relationship with her family is solely their fault—she was an innocent bystander, disowned by them simply for wanting to live life on her own terms. In early adulthood, she ran away; leaving behind a husband, a burgeoning career, and her family in order to marry another man, become an artist, and live half-a-world away. She didn’t return when her father was ill, or attend his funeral. Her art often depicts mothers, and her family sees it as a dark and shameful incrimination of them—especially her mother.
These actions would, understandably, have an effect on her family, even if the intention wasn’t to hurt anyone.
While much of the book takes place in the present moment, detailing the narrator’s speculations, sleuthing, and stalking, the more impactful parts of this story are the narrator’s memories of childhood and adolescence.
She focuses on two particular instances with her mother: 1.) on a day when her mother feigned illness in order to stay home from a family skiing trip, and the narrator followed suit, saying she was ill as well. 2.) a drawing the narrator made of her mother, which inexplicably upset her.
These memories are drawn out over the course of the novel. She tells parts of them, jumps back to the present, tells another story, comes back, returns to the primary memories.
The interiority of this book perfectly mimics the way our minds work—it is fragmentary, non-linear, obsessive, mundane, sensational. It attempts to structure a narrative, but shows its failures. Every time we retrieve a memory, it changes slightly and becomes less honest. The narrator has clearly retrieved these same memories over and over and over again—maybe she ignored them for decades, but in the course of this story, it is constant.
We see immediately upon the start of this book that our narrator is stuck in a childish perspective of the situation. She never went through the part of the child-parent relationship in which she had to empathize with them, relate to them, forgive them, because she didn’t have a relationship with them at all. For decades, her relationship with her mother was solidified in resentment. This story, this part of her life, this stalking of her mother, is her attempt to go through that process—but what if it’s too late?
The title (Is Mother Dead) is a genuine question the narrator asks briefly at the start. But as things go on, it becomes something she really has to grapple with in a different way. Grief comes in many forms, not just in physical death.
This novel is framed as a psychological thriller (in the most dry, literary sense), and I suppose it is. The short, quick sentences and chapters had me a little bit on autopilot at the start, feeling as if this would be a fast and “easy” read; but the emotional depth surprised me. The climax of this story is simply a realization on Johanna’s part, but it opens up her thinking and leads her to a resolution, though not the one she was initially hoping for (but what was she hoping for, anyhow?).
Hjorth doesn’t hide the reality of her own fractured, estranged relationship with her family. I haven’t sought out much information in regards to that, but I believe the basis is that her family wasn’t happy with her previous novel, Will and Testament, a novel exploring the cover up of child abuse within a family (I haven’t read it yet, but I’d like to soon). That situation clearly inspired her writing of this story, though I don’t know how direct the reflection is. I wrote about this novel on its own, with my own interpretations and reflections, not with any possible connection to (or knowledge of) Hjorth’s reality. Because, ya know, it’s fiction.
Further Reading
Vigdis Hjorth: The Unclassifiable Master (Astra Magazine)
How was the cover of Is Mother Dead designed? (Verso Blog)
I love this animation of the cover, over on Verso’s instagram
An extract from Is Mother Dead (the Booker Prizes)
Vigdis Hjorth & Shahidha Bari: Is Mother Dead (London Review Bookshop Podcast)
Thanks for reading today’s issue of Empty Head! Have you read (or do you plan to read) Is Mother Dead?
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