Hjorth’s precision becomes a quietly devastating mimicry of the effects of trauma, and of ambiguous and conflicting memories, on a human being ... The particulars of Bergljot’s experiences are revealed with immaculate restraint, earning Hjorth comparisons with Ibsen, but as she goes further into the past, that restraint transcends its beauty and becomes profoundly sad, the relationship of style to the pain it is describing growing more disturbing. The tension and reserve begin to seem not just a formal choice but a necessary way of being that has been bred in the narrator by the physiological imprint of trauma ... The insistent clarity, and the avoidance of gratuitous emotion – something like a gorgeously written police report at times – show the indiscriminate self-awareness one witnesses in traumatised adults ... Part of what makes this such an extraordinary book is Bergljot’s awareness of the competing pain that surrounds her, including that of the people who caused her own pain.

Approached as a standalone work of invention...Will and Testament is a powerfully humane novel about inheritance, trauma and the inheritance of trauma ... Financial settlement is an ugly proxy for emotional settlement, and Will and Testament is a fittingly ugly book, mired in the petty mundanity of internecine squabbling: furious late-night emails, Facebook unfriending and virtuoso passive-aggression. It seems only fitting that this novel’s grand moment of reckoning takes place in the drab office of the family accountant ... Charlotte Barslund’s translation captures this soul-deep fatigue with barren prose, bared to the necessary ... this is a novel of the subconscious – of dreams, symbols and obdurate, childish longings ... There is undeniable cruelty in Hjorth’s life-drawn depictions ... But there is also a shimmering vein of compassion running through Will and Testament, and an irrepressible sense of hope. Hatred cauterizes hope, but love leaves it festering. This isn’t (or isn’t only), as the book’s blurb suggestively describes it, a 'down-and-dirty revenge': it’s a tragic, terrible love story.

... 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.

Hjorth’s exploration of how trauma imprints itself on memory, shaping and confining the history of one’s life, brings to mind the work of Elfriede Jelinek and Marina Abramović, two artists the main character engages with in her own work. Will and Testament is a compulsively readable novel, one that turns questions of shame into weapons against silence.

At its most profound, this is a novel about the way that dysfunctional family life sets one person’s story against another’s with no possibility of victory ... the prose has the convincing feel of a drunken rant, as the sentences circle back on themselves. It’s an ugly book about an ugly subject, lit up only by the black humour of its anecdotes and the freer world of Bergljot’s dreams. Irritating as the repetition can be, it works to enclose us in the claustrophobia of the story, where Bergljot feels doomed to echo herself unheard ... the prose has the convincing feel of a drunken rant, as the sentences circle back on themselves. It’s an ugly book about an ugly subject, lit up only by the black humour of its anecdotes and the freer world of Bergljot’s dreams. Irritating as the repetition can be, it works to enclose us in the claustrophobia of the story, where Bergljot feels doomed to echo herself unheard ... In this unappealing but compelling book, Hjorth proves brilliant at revealing the stubborn, unredemptive quality of childhood suffering.

The strength of the novel lies in Bergljot's convincing and continuing vulnerability, in her mixed feelings and her flaws ... The drama heightens—there are confrontations, an overdose, a death, pleas for reconciliation, a sealed letter in a safe—but it's her desire to be believed and truly seen that drives the narrative forward. There are no easy resolutions here ... A cleareyed and convincing story of a family's doomed attempt to reconcile and the limits of forgiveness.

... captivating, psychologically intense ... Hjorth’s thoughtful, drily funny, and often devastating novel will leave a deep and lasting impression on readers.