Nordic Book Club—Long Live the Post Horn! by Vigdis Hjorth

Read and discuss Scandinavian literature in translation as part of our Nordic Book Club, now online! Each month we select a novel from some of the best Nordic literary voices. Discussions have typically taken place the last Tuesday of the month at Scandinavia House but will now be taking place bi-weekly as an online meeting.

On July 20, we’ll be discussing the new book Long Live the Post Horn! by Vigdis Hjorth, out now in translation by Charlotte Barslund from Verso Fiction.

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 recognize 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.

Hailed as “a brilliant study of the mundane, full of unexpected detours and driving prose” (New York Times Book Review) Long Live the Post Horn! is an existential scream of a novel about loneliness (and the postal service), written in Vigdis Hjorth’s trademark spare, rhythmic and cutting style.