Vigdis Hjorth

Winner of the 2020 Believer Book Award for Fiction "A brilliant study of the mundane, full of unexpected detours and driving prose. Hjorth's novel ingeniously orbits the intimate stories that are possible only when a character has put words on paper and sent them through the post." – New York Times Book Review, “The Best Post Office Novel You Will Read Before the Election” "Vigdis Hjorth is one of my favorite contemporary writers." – Sheila Heti, author of Motherhood and How Should a Person Be? From the author of the 2019 National Book Award Longlisted Will and Testament Ellinor, a 35-year-old media consultant, has not been feeling herself; she's not been feeling much at all lately. Far beyond jaded, she picks through an old diary and fails to recognise the woman in its pages, seemingly as far away from the world around her as she's ever been. But when her coworker vanishes overnight, an unusual new task is dropped on her desk. Off she goes to meet the Norwegian Postal Workers Union, setting the ball rolling on a strange and transformative six months. This is an existential scream of a novel about loneliness (and the postal service!), written in Vigdis Hjorth's trademark spare, rhythmic and cutting style.

Long Live the Post Horn!

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i was bored for like 10 mins only and that's rare i really enjoyed it

Deepika Ramesh

Trigger Warning: This book review contains mentions of suicide and depression.

There was a lid over the world. As in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, I thought. I wondered if I should read it again, but surely it would only intensify my sense of isolation, I punch my fists into the air as if to smash the glass, but nothing happened. Where are the others, I thought. If it’s true, as it’s claimed, that other people really exist. I’m swimming underwater, I thought. They scream and shout and carry on on TV, but what for? Anyone can work out that life is ultimately a losing game.

The physiological and social needs on Maslow’s Hierarchy are met. According to a bourgeois, that should keep Ellinor happy. If she ‘complains’ about anything else in life, she would be shamed for it. She would be attacked for not acknowledging her privilege. But her struggles are real. She wonders why she has to wake up every morning. Why should she call her mother? Why is her sister so full of hope despite the terrible things which happened to her? Why? What is a routine? What is repetition? Why is she on this planet? Who put her on it? If someone put her on it, doesn’t she have the right to time her exit? All those impassive faces, the sea of humanity that she crosses on the road every day, how do they all feel about being here? Do they talk about it? Do they WANT to talk about it? If they talk, is the world ready to be stabbed by their truth? When Ellinor says, “Being human isn’t easy,” she becomes my voice too. She gives words to the existential dread that smothers me every night.

Fight for a cause, came a whisper from the hallway.

In the first many pages of Vigdis Hjorth’s Long Live The Post Horn (translated from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund) Ellinor’s depression is palpable. Her struggle intensifies after a colleague dies by suicide. The book triggers; it’s relentless at it. At some point in time, I asked myself if I wanted to continue reading at all. But when Ellinor starts working with Norwegian Postal Workers Union, the novel transcends into an ode to letters, post office, and postal workers. Ellinor’s reluctant interactions with the postal workers are so moving and inspiring that I want to write a letter to somebody, and I want to assume the responsibility of protecting the postal workers’ job, and the dying art of letter writing. Hjorth has a subtle argument with me about the damaging effect of capitalism on my life and mental health. When the Ellinor’s and the postal workers’ lives intersect, it becomes the classic, life-affirming situation of who-rescues-whom.

What do we do with our despair if our lives are too small to contain it? Deny our despair and ignore our beating hearts, remain at odds with ourselves and fight ourselves, or accept that there’s so much we’ll never understand intellectually and try to live with things which don’t add up, that what’s most important might be something we can only just sense, and teach our brains to illuminate our hearts and help us live with contradictions that can’t be cancelled out and become open to the idea that being a mere mortal is enough, more than enough in most respects, and once we’re alive, try to live with gratitude and passion…

I am going to shift to cynicism now. When someone is given the hand to walk away from the edge of life, what happens to them after that moment? Most books end there. They pander to the readers who demand happy ending, a fairy tale. Ellinor gets something to fight for. If she wins, what will happen to her after the glow of victory fades? Does she go back to being Sylvia Plath’s protagonist? Does she flit from one cause to another? My argument is not that I hate books which choose to give hope, but I want books to be more honest about depression and the ruthless way it relapses. Books aim for a crescendo. The aha-aha moment when the protagonist will be bathed in light. When I finished reading Long Live The Post Horn, I wasn’t infected by the hope that tried to emanate from my tablet. It’s been a week since I finished reading the book, and I have presented several questions to myself on why I wasn’t affected by its optimism. I have decided to blame it on the pandemic. Ellinor’s questions on existential dread continue to circle in my head. My post office may arrive soon. Or, I will find it in my heart to see the post offices in my life already. Maybe, not. But, above all, there are words, and I will crawl into their all-knowing embrace.

"A colleague's suicide prompts a media consultant to work with a postal workers' union struggling for survival. To her surprise, the new assignment brings hope at a time of personal desperation"--

Deyana

It's haunting, sometimes, when you pick up a book and read some sentences that seem less like someone else's words and more like your own. It's almost like an echo, or an instance of deja vu. 

I had never heard anything about Vigdis Hjorth nor anything about a postal directive (I don't know as much about the EU as I probably should), but I'm grateful that I have now. I ordered this book online from Verso because within the past year in quarantine, I fell in love with writing letters to friends, and I also wanted to get closer to fiction again. 

I think if I read this book at another moment in my life, it would not have resonated as much with me. But as Ellinor, the main character in the novel finds out later rather than sooner, sometimes everything we need is in the present rather than the looming tomorrows. And for that, I too, am grateful.

Celine Nguyen ✿

A fairy tale for mildly (or achingly) depressed adults who worry all the time about neoliberalism. The first third of the novel is an almost distressingly empathetic portrayal of a Norwegian woman mired in loneliness. I texted a friend halfway through reading it: 'Maybe it was a mistake to read a Scandinavian novel about depression in the winter?' But the story turns towards a hopeful, earnest note with incredible gentleness and grace. This feels like a story that will sustain me all winter.

By 'fairy tale', I mean—this is a very joyful story, in the end. If you're politically left-leaning there is something enormously sustaining about reading a story where someone manages to find a cause that inspires emotion, solidarity, and purpose—and manages to win. We all need more stories of people winning the small, difficult, uphill battles against the increasing tendencies of neoliberalism. As Wendy Erksine's blurb says (on the back of the Verso paperback), 'In truth, I had no idea just how much a book dealing with Norwegian union responses to an EU free-competition postal directive would mean to me.'

By 'for adults', I mean—this is not a novel where personal transformation is immediate and easy. It's actually quite painful reading about the protagonist's slow struggle out of her haze of loneliness and isolation. But I'm not sure I like reading about straightforward and easy happy endings anymore. I feel too old, too acutely aware that one's life never gets replaced entirely with a better one; the better one has to be assembled, slowly and carefully, out of the people and moments we have in this one. As the protagonist writes near the end, 'What do we do with our despair if our lives are too small to contain it? Deny our despair and ignore our beating hearts, remain at odds with ourselves and fight ourselves, or…teach our brains to illuminate our hearts and help us live with contradictions that can't be cancelled out and become open to the idea that being a mere mortal is enough, more than enough in most respects, and once we're alive, try to live with gratitude and passion rather than shame and paralysis.'

I loved this book. Hjorth's prose is saturated with empathy and it's easy to feel quite tenderly towards the characters. There are very few conventional descriptions of them; it's hard to figure out their ages, how they look, any physical features (this is a very good book if you believe in body neutrality, I suppose)—but their interior lives are so vividly articulated.

I would especially recommend this for anyone who's read and felt deeply moved by Ali Smith's novels.

Gary Homewood

Disillusioned female PR consultants colleague disappears, she finds a sense of purpose taking on his work in a campaign to prevent an EU directive affecting the Norwegian postal service. 

Droll, a bit flat, odd phrasing. Simultaneously more and less interesting than it sounds.

Long Live the Post Horn!

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