Reviews

"Og Alma tenkte hun skulle brodere en parmiddag så umulig og klaustrofobisk som hun opplevde dem. (...) Lage et bilde så han forsto at sånn han mente menneskene skulle være sammen, kunne ikke Alma være sammen med andre, at formene hans ikke passet for alle, at formene kunne gjøre vold framfor å virke samlende." (s.80)

Dette er den første romanen jeg har lest av Vigdis Hjorth, har tidligere bare lest "Jørgen + Anne = sant" og husker den som en av mine favoritter som barn, og jeg hadde ganske høye forventninger til denne boka. Og den skuffet absolutt ikke!

Hjorth skriver utrolig bra, og på underkant av 200 sider tar hun opp utrolig mange viktige temaer på en veldig enkel og fin måte, som får deg til å stoppe opp og tenke.
Handlingen er enkel og troverdig. Jeg både hatet og elsket hovedpersonen, Alma.

Alt i alt er dette en veldig god bok som det er verdt å sette av noen dager på å lese. Og jeg personlig kommer til å fortsette å lese Vigdis Hjorth, for jeg ble virkelig helt betatt av språket hennes!

petersonline's review against another edition

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4.0

Over the summer, my family had to urgently evacuate their apartment complex because of an unsavory couple who lived above their unit. The pair moved to Seattle from Toronto, and arrived with a severely malnourished dog whom they forced to run for miles each day, making her swim out in the water while the owner paddleboarded. They refused to speak to anyone else in the complex. When we would see them outside, we were often met with glares or looks of confusion. The man, a classic tech bro who skied on the weekends, was particularly horrible. His girlfriend, a rosy-cheeked woman, would often walk by us quickly, averting all eye contact. At night, they would make lots of noise, banging on the floor, shouting, yelling, smashing pots and pans together. Sometimes the dog could be heard, sliding across the floor at an ungodly hour. Something terrible was clearly happening above us. As tensions rose in the apartment, and the couple showed no desire to stop making their nightly cacophonous sounds, my family was the first to move out.

In Vigdis Hjorth's A House in Norway, Norwegian novelist Hjorth attempts to capture this quiet tension and nosiness that builds and builds into a storm. In the case of this novel, protagonist Alma's relationship with her neighbors isn't so neighborly. Her neighbors are renting a guesthouse from her, and have been for several years. They are Polish refugees named Slawomira and Alan, and Alma felt quite virtuous letting them into her home. An artist, feminist, and staunch liberal, Alma has always viewed herself as accepting to all. Over the course of Slawomira and Alan's tenancy, Alma's sense of self is tested. She questions the ethics of owning and renting out her property, as well as her negative, knee-jerk reactions to their strange behavior.

Alma spends much of her time working on her various tapestries, with one in particular meant to "celebrate the centenary of women's suffrage in Norway." While she becomes ensconced in the subject of her tapestries, she can't stop thinking about her tenants, and everything that she believes is wrong with them: they use all the hot water, keep the heat on blast, park in the wrong spots, and treat her with light disdain. At the beginning of the novel, Alma talks about how she prefers a tenant who minds their own business, so why is she so caught up in the lives of these people?

Throughout the book, the tenants never do anything morally terrible. They aren't the best tenants, sure, but Hjorth writes them as much more sinister people than they actually are. This made for a particularly compelling reading experience. I was reminded of fiction by writers like Katie Kitamura, a master of the anticlimax. The whole book, I kept waiting for one of the tenants to kill Alma, or lock her inside of her home. Hjorth's ominous prose kept me engaged, trying to put the pieces together amidst the large blocks of text that made up the novel.

A novel that's basically about a woman who can't mind her own business, Alma's procrastination and obsession with her tenants made me sad. While all of this is going on, we watch her relationship with her boyfriend slightly deteriorate, her visits with her children poisoned by the bad behavior of the tenants. Though this is a book that certainly gets repetitive, the space of a novel is needed for this story, one that spans a number of years in such a short amount of pages. I found Hjorth's observations to be entertaining, reminding me of some of her contemporaries like Makenna Goodman and Sheila Heti (both of whom have listed Hjorth as a favorite), and her quietly angry prose to be pleasantly disconcerting, using choice words to hint at how Alma felt in a way that wasn't obvious ("she drove around aimlessly listening to some idiotic radio station").

I admire Vigdis Hjorth for her ability to paint a picture of a woman like Alma, someone we all know, someone we sometimes behave similarly to. While reading this novel, I often thought about the oft-quoted "the personal is political," which, to read it in a different way than originally intended, could mean that the way we behave in our private lives is political in its own way. I thought about this a lot near a moment of introspection at the end of the novel, when Alma drives the tenants out of the guesthouse. She thinks about how she had (perhaps inadvertently) made a refugee and a survivor of domestic violence lose her housing. Would a "good feminist" and a "good liberal" do that? That's for the reader to decide.

illustrated_librarian's review against another edition

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reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

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