«Sophisticated and professional … Through Vigdis Hjorth’s experienced, sophisticated treatment, the story has been moved to our times … Hjorth has obviously enjoyed describing and satirizing the petty bourgeois, narrow environment around Henrik Falk, as well as embellishing Tale Løvlie’s vital character. As always she manages to twist the constellations between the characters … it’s an exciting, good book … Ibsen is eternally relevant, and Hjorth’s book actually inspires the reader to re-read the classics.”
5/6 stars, VG
“In every way Henrik Falk seems a project after Hjorth’s own heart. She exaggerates conformity just about enough to make it seem precisely right. Hjorth’s both everyday and insisting prose matches the tensions of Ibsen’s play well. It’s a joy to read … In spite of fatal events, Henrik Falk is more comic than tragic, and the book offers a fresh, humorous look on society. Perhaps it’s this change of temper that causes Hjorth’s book to stand firmly on its own legs: It has it’s very own temperament, and is in no way a copy.”
Vårt Land
“Vigdis Hjorth doesn’t spare the clichees here. She uses a broad brush in her portrait of a man with the psychological depth of a puddle. Where Hedda Gabler comes across as something of an enigma you strive to understand, Henrik Falk is through and through a self-obsessed character that you would love to help jump off a cliff. But I forgive Vigdis Hjorth everything because of the novel’s ending. Here is a punchline which should earn the author vine leaves in her own hair.”
5/6 stars, Dagbladet
”Few can write as acerbically wicked, precise and at the same time humorous and ambiguous prose about people caught in social constructions as Vigdis Hjorth, and it’s liberating to see the modern, over-domineering woman through an (incompetent) man’s eyes.”
Elle, Denmark
”The author, who already with her novel Wills and Testaments has analyzed the horrors of a seemingly spotless family, is right at home when she turns her acerbic wit to the infected, hypernormal Norwegian routine marriage, which Henrik out of bitter need has got caught up in … Hjorth lets the curtain fall, just like Ibsen does in Ibsen’s dramatic works. Where did Nora go? And what happened with Hedda Gabler? Vigdis Hjorth sets the scene with quite simple means and unique precision in this wonderful chamber play”
5/6 stars, Nordjyske, Denmark
”A wonderful sense of comedy (and tragedy)
Weekendavisen, Denmark
”Vigdis Hjorth refines Ibsen’s psychological realism”
Information, Denmark
“All expectations are met by Hjorth in this fast-paced, brilliant thriller, which preserves the suspense of Hedda Gabler. It’s written with the kind of high stakes, I would almost say contempt of death, that makes it a pure pleasure to read, despite its, to put it mildly, sinister themes.”
Jönköpings-Posten
“Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler can be glimpsed like a palimpsest underneath Hjorth’s novel, every incident and character has a counterpart in the original. But even so, the novel is an independent story that depicts the male social role, just like Ibsen once depicted the female social role.
Aftonbladet, Sweden
