Hjorth writes with the feminist bluntness of Annie Ernaux, the psychic precision of Javier Marías and the lyrical repetitions of Jon Fosse ... Neat, clever and lively.
Repetition is a powerful sliver of a book—it really doesn’t have enough pages to contain as much life as it does. It transcends the trauma plot by, counterintuitively, immersing us completely in the past: not in one devastating event, but in the whole past, of moment after moment.
Repetition is an oblique, somewhat cryptic work. The settling of debts between the older narrator—with all her riches of knowledge, irony, independence, experience, and distinction—and her defenseless younger self has the feel of a private project. But considered as part of Hjorth’s body of work on the story of family abuse, Repetition offers her most sustained attempt to imagine the parents’ morally compromised existence.
Hjorth’s prose is elegantly, claustrophobically interior; her books have a breathless quality, poised between a headlong plunge and a pressured pause ... The relationship between repetition, memory, and writing becomes Hjorth’s explicit theme.
The interest of the book’s narrative is significantly diminished by its familiarity ... Readers engrossed by the similarities between the protagonists of auto-fiction and their authors will be fascinated by Hjorth’s minor variations on the same theme. Others will feel that their time would be better spent reading another novel.
A 60-something writer revisits her stormy adolescence and painful family secrets in the devastating latest from Hjorth ... Hjorth writes vividly of the narrator’s teenage confusion and pain, and her lifelong search for comfort. This swells with emotion.
