A House in Norway by Vigdis Hjorth

How different this year looks from the one I sketched onto the calendar on the wall above my desk in January. I was supposed to be giving a keynote in Oslo in March and speaking at a sustainability conference at Yale the following week, as well as speaking at various local writers’ festivals about the new edition of Six Capitals. Needless to say, all conferences and festivals have been postponed indefinitely. The Oslo-Yale trip was cancelled days before I was due to fly out of Sydney, but given I was seriously questioning the idea of flying across the world and burning carbon miles for the purpose of speaking for a few hours about climate change and sustainability, I felt more relief than grief at being forced to stay home. It’s been one of the many clarifying moments of 2020 for me.

The best thing about the trip was that in preparing for Oslo I read my first Norwegian novel in at least a decade: Vigdis Hjorth’s A House in Norway (2014). It’s about a textile artist, Alma, who lives alone near the sea in an old house with a small wing she rents for extra income. Her boyfriend lives nearby, her adult children visit at Christmas time and their father is long gone. The novel focuses on Alma’s complicated relationships with her art making and turbulent emotional life, her house, and her tenants, a young Polish woman and her small daughter.

It’s a merciless, seamless exposition of a creative, solitary, property-owning, privileged European woman’s psyche and her fraught relationships to her tenants, her nation’s past, its North Sea oil privilege, her children, boyfriend and mother. I found it disturbingly compelling and confronting. I raced through it. It spoke straight to my complex relationship with my own house and those who inhabit it, human and otherwise, and my discomfort with my apparently unstoppable drift to introverted creative solitude during Covid-19. To give you a sense of the strange intensity and energy of this brilliant novel, here are two sections from towards the end that struck me (but I could extract the whole novel, every passage is dense with life and provocation):

‘She had missed her mother desperately as she grew up, of course she had, only to learn that she had been alive and living close by. And when she uncovered the reason for keeping her incarcerated, cut off from her own child, she found that it was based on loose suppositions and inexact character assessments: unstable temperament, difficulties in adapting, reluctant to submit. In those days quite natural reactions to living in restricted conditions with no opportunity to express yourself were regarded as a sickness to be treated, but the treatment available was barbaric.’ (101)

‘Though, of course, her shamelessly uninhibited outpouring was the very reason why Ninja couldn’t get her pamphlet against psychiatry published by a proper publisher, but had had to publish it herself, and thus it had never reached a large audience. But Alma was full of admiration that she had written and published it anyway, that she’d had the courage; she had been able to afford to do so because she had just inherited her father’s money. To inherit or not to inherit, that is the question, as Virginia Woolf also thought, but what we inherit which isn’t purely financial is also significant. Alma hadn’t inherited rage or rebellion, she realised now. Alma could be angry and outraged in thought and attitude, but she had rarely felt rage deep in her heart, deep in her very core, it became clear to her now as she was confronted with Ninja B.’s anger and outrage at the, in her opinion, unfairly incarcerated women. Ninja B. wrote plainly that she thought there was a little too long between French revolutions.’ (102)

Thanks to this altered year, I’m returning to book blogging for the first time since I shut down bookishgirl* in December 2016. It seems timely, when so many people are seeking comfort in books, when artists and the arts generally are so imperilled, and when the federal and New South Wales state governments seem intent on minimising the already paltry funding to books and writers. Most recently, in the astonishing decision by Create New South Wales to cut funding to the state’s most avid and tireless supporter of writers and writing, Writing NSW.

So I’ll be blogging here regularly about the books I’m reading. These days I’m especially reading genre-bending work that breaches the bounds of fiction, nonfiction, autobiography, essay, like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, Sheila Heti’s Motherhood and Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet. Since 2018 I’ve been avidly reading all of Maggie Nelson, Elena Ferrante, Rachel Cusk, Deborah Levy, Sheila Heti, Jenny Offill, Olivia Laing and Sally Rooney, among other thrilling contemporary writers. There are so many extraordinary writers right now. I’ve also been reading a lot of poetry, especially this year, including Anne Carson, Maggie Nelson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Judith Wright and, courtesy of a friend’s recommendation, recently touching the surface of the prolific and seemingly ubiquitous Mary Oliver.

Local writers I’ve been reading recently include Glenn Albrecht’s world remaking Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World, Sophie Cunningham’s beautiful essay collection City of Trees, Charlotte Wood’s page-turning novel The Weekend and Lucia Osborne-Crowley’s powerful memoir I Choose Elena.

 * More on bookish girl: some untraceable person has taken over my old website address, bookishgirl.com.au, and put up several of my old blogs word for word, three of which I adapted from my first book Classics. This is not me! The blogs s/he’s posted on the Women of the World Festival, Invisible Man, The Member of the Wedding and The Words to Say It were all written by me.