As winter approaches in Norway and the daylight dwindles, a chance encounter prompts a novelist to reexamine her past. The seismic events following her sixteenth birthday return, exposing a story both familiar and strange.
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.
