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.
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.
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.
