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Is Mother Dead

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Is Mother Dead

By: Vigdis Hjorth
Narrated by: Kim Bretton
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About this listen

A cat and mouse game of surveillance and psychological torment develops between a middle-aged artist and her aging mother, as Vigdis Hjorth returns to the themes of her controversial modern classic, Will and Testament

'To mother is to murder, or close enough', thinks Johanna, as she looks at the spelling of the two words in Norwegian. She's recently widowed and back in Oslo after a long absence as she prepares for a retrospective of her art. The subject of her work is motherhood and some of her more controversial paintings have brought about a dramatic rift between parent and child. This new proximity, after decades of acrimonious absence, set both women on edge, and before too long Johanna finds her mother stalking her thoughts, and Johanna starts stalking her mother's house.

©2020 Cappelen Damm (P)2023 Tantor
Women's Fiction

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Wonderful dissection of family dynamics

What brilliant insight into mothers and family dynamics! i enjoyed this a lot.

i wasn't sure about the narrator at first -- though she grew on me. i still think there is more subtlety in the writing than was conveyed in the performance. Much of the book is description of the mother but via the daughter's projections. The narrator captures the child's anger and frustration but not the complexity and irony in the fact that she is both enacting and fully aware of her projections. To me there was some humour in the fusion of the child and a self aware 'unreliable narrator'. There was scope for an actor to capture this depth but the narrator was a bit one dimensional.

Wonderful story...

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