Review of Long Live the Post Horn! by Vigdis Hjorth

*Long Live the Post Horn!* by Vigdis Hjorth, translated by Charlotte Barslund (2020). Published by Verso.

For those of you who have never set foot virtually into this space, welcome! This is my blog, which serves as an online diary and digital archive of everything I’ve watched, read, and experienced in the past few years. Recently, it has become a source of income for me, and a crux as I faced unexpected unemployment after an opportunity I was told I had fell through. Feel free to click around if you liked this post.

Anyways, in the fall of 2024 I entered a period of what I call funemployment. I had been promised an opportunity that never materialized, after waiting three months and being assured that I would have the opportunity in the end, and once that was over, I took a hard look at my finances and realized I had enough to live my life for a bit.

So I decided to read a lot of books, watch a lot of movies and television shows, and travel. This blog has been something I’ve really worked on throughout this time, and although this post is going to come out a bit later because of the sheer amount of backlog I have, I’m happy with this decision.

One of my newest hobbies has been going to the new fiction section of my library and seeing what books from around the world they’ve stocked. They’ve really upped their game in recent years when it comes to acquiring books that are more diverse. This time, I was in the new fiction when I spotted Long Live the Post Horn! and decided to pick it up.

I’ve never read any Norwegian novels before, so this was perfect for my new mission of diversifying the kinds of books I am reading.

Let’s get into the review before I start rambling too much!

A media consultant finds a new purpose after the disappearance of her coworker.

This is a pretty short novel; it clocks in at about 196 pages with the English translation, and I would say the time reading it flies by quickly. I finished the novel in an hour and a half, but I am a faster reader than most people.

That said, our protagonist in the novel is Ellinor. She’s 35 and works as a media consultant at a Norwegian company she helped co-found, and she’s been in quite the funk lately. I read this as potentially being depression coded, and she doesn’t really feel anything when it comes to the world around her (a numbness), and she also feels distanced from her life.

One day she goes through one of her old diaries and see how far she has fallen since then. It’s like looking at a completely new person when she goes through the diary. But at work, where she is one of three employees, one of her coworkers goes missing.

Turns out he’s dead, as we discover in some later sections of the novel, but then Ellinor is tasked with something completely new to observe: she needs to meet with the Norwegian Postal Workers Union.

This kickstarts the rest of the novel. As Ellinor follows the breadcrumbs left behind by her dead coworker, this also becomes a novel about the postal union and their campaign to liberalize the postal market. Turns out this is something that happened in real life, as I started Googling around after reading the novel.

So we have this aspect about the postal union, then there are the sections about Ellinor’s own struggles. For this to happen, albeit with the tragedy of her coworker, is something that makes me think this is a novel mainly about finding one’s purpose.

Before she was just kind of wandering the familiar roads she had always gone on, living just to be alive. She wasn’t actually alive, and she was disconnected from everything around her. Suddenly she’s sucked back into the world with this investigation, even if it was just be happenstance.

Overall Thoughts

I’m iffy on this novel. I don’t have a ton to say about it, but I think I enjoyed the parts about Ellinor’s struggles the most. The post union sections had me scratching my head a bit, but I could see how and why it fit into the story the author was trying to tell.

The writing itself is very good. The translation is as well. Sometimes a translation is too wooden and methodic for the reader to fully enjoy what they are reading, but I liked this novel’s prose in translation. It flowed well, and 196 pages was just the right length.

Any longer and we would’ve been vaguely tortured in the semantics. I was starting to get a little tortured with those details.

I say go read this one if you’re interested. It’s not too long, so it fits right nicely into a weekend read.

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