Letters

The Editors

Don’t Mute the Post Horn

The Post Horn Always Blows Twice

Dear Editors,

I was delighted to read Gemma Sack’s thoughtful essay on five novels by Vigdis Hjorth (“Officially Good People”) in Issue 50 of n+1 . Sack is right to focus on Hjorth as, among other things, a writer of Scandinavian social democracy, a perspective that works particularly well for A House in Norway . I also like the way she brings out the psychoanalytic preoccupations in Hjorth’s texts.

However, Sack misses a crucial dimension of Hjorth’s 2012 novel Long Live the Post Horn! , namely the way the novel responds to the most horrific event in Norwegian history after World War II. This is not a criticism of Sack, for most foreign readers wouldn’t necessarily see the connections. (I didn’t immediately see it myself when I first read the novel in North Carolina.…