There are clear parallels between this story and the stunning late-90s Danish film Festen (The Celebration, in English), in which a man attends a grand birthday party for his father, using the well-attended occasion to publicly disclose the familys dark history. Hjorth mentions the film multiple times in her novel, and explicitly, effectively contrasts her storys upshot with that of the movie.

I was so inhibited and traumatized that I had to stay away from something that might have been good for me, Bergljot writes after not attending a party. All because of my stupid childhood. That should be my epitaph: All because of my stupid childhood.

THE GIRL AT THE DOORBy Veronica RaimoTranslated by Stash Luczkiw 229 pp. Black Cat. Paper, $16.

Dystopian fatigue is real. It seems that every other novel today is set in some undetermined yet overdetermined future. The Girl at the Door, the first work by the Italian writer Raimo to be translated into English, freshens the genre a bit by setting it in a utopia. Miden is a fictional island where there are no longer any diminutives or pet names, Raimo writes. They were eliminated from the language to keep women from being harangued in an untoward or debasing way. There are no poor people there, nor even unhappy people, because the society couldnt conceive of them.

The novel is told in brief, alternating chapters narrated by characters simply called Him and Her. He is a professor of philosophy in Miden, and she is his pregnant partner. She has recently been visited by a former student of the professor who claims that he raped her throughout an affair they had two years ago. I didnt know then, the girl tells her, meaning that she had been subjected to violence. I know now. A commission is deciding whether he is guilty of causing TRAUMA No. 215 in his victim.

The book makes vague mention of an international language, and as in many dystopian stories there are plenty of portentous, underexplained words in capital letters: There was a Crash that led many to emigrate to Miden. The female narrators father was one of the founders of the Dream. There are Mediators who are subjected to constant monitoring and psychological stress tests in which they had to demonstrate their objectivity even in the most controversial situations and what was often meant by controversy was just life.

Everything in Miden is produced locally because imported goods make the inhabitants feel destabilized by the unknown. Readers have reason to believe that the professor is at the very least morally cloudy, but Raimo is clearly most interested in complicating our ideas about what it might mean to expunge, or even attempt to expunge, the worst impulses and elements from society.

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Love and War in European Fiction - The New York Times