"The ordinary becomes vibrant and life-affirming in Long Live the Post Horn!, an engrossing novel about how evenhopeless battles are worth fighting."
—Eileen Gonzalez, Foreword Reviews
"Quirky, unsettling."
—Kirkus Reviews
"Hjorth’s substantive and witty novel of personal growth delivers on multiple levels."
—Publishers Weekly
"An emotional, philosophical read...this book is wonderful, and I would urge you to seek it out."
—Elspells Books
"Immersive, original...I really would urge you to read it, to be surprised, and to maybe let it change the way you see certain things."
—Elspells
"A superb story about a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown"
—The Modern Novel
"Wrenching tenderness from the mouth of irony, Hjorth proves how major effects don’t always come from the heavy-foot pedals."
—Lit Hub (“Most Anticipated Books of 2020”), John Freeman
"Long Live the Post Horn! is a brilliant study of the mundane, full of unexpected detours and driving prose. ... Hjorth’s novel ingeniously orbits the intimate stories that are possible only when a character has put words on paper and sent them through the post."
—John Freeman, New York Times Book Review
"A wry and thoughtful take on contemporary life and love ... Full of gorgeous Scandi gloom and bleak truths about human relationships"
—Daily Mail
"[In] Long Live the Post Horn!, the saga of the EU postal directive is an inspired context for a story about personal despair and political awakening."
—Brian Dillon, 4Columns
"An acidic portrait of one woman’s fight to save the postal service."
—Megan Evershed, The New Republic
"An engaging, well-honed novel ... Hjorth's writing is both spare and, in an understated way, humorous."
—R.P. Finch, PopMatters
"Hjorth holds a magnifying glass to her characters and they fry like ants under the merciless sunlight of her writing. No one of them escapes unscathed, there are no heroes or villains; what we get is a picture of life in a social democracy that is fraying at the edges."
—Charlotte Barslund, Literary Hub
"Hjorth expertly interrogates feelings of inadequacy in concise paragraphs of wry prose"
—New Statesman
"Droll and rather delightful"
—Monocle
"A novel about the chicanery of governmental politics has no right to be this absorbing"
—Morning Star
"A big strange wonderful paper hug of a book ... I cannot recommend it highly enough"
—The Literary Addict
"Hjorth asks us to imagine a world where those with narrative power protect the stories of the people over the interests of commerce. ... The timing was right for this book in Norway in 2012, and the timing is right for us now. A novel like Long Live the Post Horn! does not come around often enough."
—Makenna Goodman, Los Angeles Review of Books
"funny, wry, insightful, and finally sincere."
—Fiona McFarlane
"The brilliance of Vigdis Hjorth is her ability to match a distinctive lack of sentimentality with a seductive and questing idealism"
—Emily Stewart, Saturday Paper
"Hjorth’s novel is a jolting tour de force impossible to put down, gleaming with philosophical insight and tenderness in the most unexpected places."
—Denise Rose Hansen, 3:AM Magazine
"Slim but fulfilling ... Hjorth’s brisk, spare prose invigorates Long Live the Post Horn!, making it a captivating read."
—Robert Allen Papinchak, World Literature Today
"Luminous ... Lucidly translated by Charlotte Barslund, this slight novel – a chapterless stream of consciousness interrupted by dialogue – can be read in a single sitting."
—Chloë Ashby, Times Literary Supplement
"Gripping, inspiring, and politically revolutionary"
—Alexandra Kleeman, Vanity Fair
"Long Live the Post Horn! is an ordinary person’s epic tale of how it feels to emerge from the thralldom of apathy: how one feeble movement unleashes the torrential energy of life renewed."
—Ingrid D. Rowland, New York Review of Books
"Made me want to storm the barricades of Royal Mail"
—Rebecca Liu, White Review
"A strange and funny and psychologically incisive novel about how community can revitalise, how grassroots activism and empathy are the salves in a world made lonely and malignant by individualism"
—Susannah Dickey, Big Issue
"Long Live the Post Horn! is a reaffirming novel that reminds one of how sliding into depression is so seamless it barely registers as motion of any kind."
—Utkarsh Mani Tripathi, Vogue India
2020-07-01
A 35-year-old Norwegian publicist faces an existential crisis in Hjorth's quirky, unsettling novel.
Hjorth hangs her plot on a footnote in Norwegian history. In 2011, the European Union demanded that the Norwegian postal service allow competition in the delivery of letters weighing less than 50 grams, and the postal union fought back. The novel imagines narrator Ellinor as part of a ragtag three-person publicity company that is reduced by a third when Dag, who is supposed to be handling the postal union's account, suddenly quits, sails away, and commits suicide. Ellinor, who often can't remember what she did a day or an hour ago and who yearns “for a breakdown. To surrender to it and be carted off to a quiet and balmy place far away,” at first feels that the boredom of the account may push her over the edge, but then she commits to allowing the passion and enthusiasm of the union members to give her own life meaning. Unfortunately for the reader, unhinged Ellinor is far more fascinating than the Ellinor who exults in the intricacies of letter delivery and the details of converting people to the union cause. Just when it seems that Ellinor may be able to lift herself out of the depths of trying to make sense of her old diaries and focus on the people around her, including a newly pregnant sister and a newish boyfriend with a son from an earlier relationship, she becomes obsessed with the postal union. Her friends and family, insufficiently developed as characters, fall to the narrative wayside, and the reader is left trying to work up some interest in arcane matters. Though it's tempting to suspect that Hjorth is taking a nuanced view of Ellinor's obsession, ultimately it seems that we're supposed to conclude that it's straightforwardly noble, and it grows increasingly hard to care about either Ellinor or her redemption.
An unconvincing account of willed self-transformation.
