MixedThe New Yorker... prickly, persuasive ... Like Knausgaard, Hjorth is writing against repression, against the taboo on telling things as they really are. But he urges us to look at dead bodies; she forces ... Like Knausgaard, Hjorth is writing against repression, against the taboo on telling things as they really are. But he urges us to look at dead bodies; she forces us to regard bleeding souls. ... a gut-wrenching novel, but it is also a gossipy one, which begs to be read in an old-fashioned, judgmental manner. Right and wrong, good and bad, are applicable modes of assessment here. The reader, furnished with primary documents, has the opportunity to take a side. In fact, to be a moral person in the zero-sum world of this novel, she must ... Bergljot is settling scores with herself as much as with anybody else. She is striving, in the Kierkegaardian tradition, to create a majority of one. It’s a solitary quest of detours and traps, including the fear that, as both narrator and character, she has somehow got the story all wrong. An inveterate phone-talker, Bergljot tells her tale as one would in conversations with a friend, doubling back on earlier versions as though to retrieve some crucial detail that might prove her claim once and for all, vacillating among indignation and dark humor and self-doubt. These stops and starts illustrate the painful circularity of Bergljot’s problem: people don’t believe her because she’s a basket case, but she’s a basket case because people don’t believe her ... There is a certain audacity in saying, \'I heard the email notification from my iPhone on the seat next to me, an act of war, was my guess,\' and asking people to take you seriously.
