Long Live the Post Horn! Vigdis Hjorth, trans. Charlotte Barslund
I’ll confess that I read this book pretty much solely because it involves saving a postal service, and I’ve been reading a few books which involve post and postal services in order to stock up on reviews for Postcrossing’s blog. Long Live the Post Horn! is a drifting, rambling novel in which a woman having a mid-life crisis about everything being fake and meaningless recovers her passion through getting involved in the fight to save the postal service from an EU initiative to introduce competition.
The problem for me is that rambling, wishy-washy quality — that stream-of-consciousness has never been my style. There are a couple of bits I liked, bits which capture some of the joy of post in particular, and also a scene in which the main character’s boyfriend explains he sends letters to himself as a sort of life coach — something about that felt distinctive and endearing, rather than kind of generic as in the rest of the book.
Not one I enjoyed — the narrator who never quite knows what she’s doing or why will never really work for me — but I’m sure there are people who will.
