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.
On the line level, there is a powerful effect produced by the recycling of entire sentences, not only within a single narrative but across her body of work. It never becomes monotonous, as recurrence is itself a theme ... Across Hjorth’s novels, characters utter a variation of the sentence 'It isn’t easy being human.' It is most forceful when delivered by the father in Repetition, after he opens his daughter’s diary and finds a fabricated account of her losing her virginity ... Just as it is not easy to be a person, it is not easy to write convincing novels about abuse that do not moralize. Anglophone readers of Vigdis Hjorth have the privilege of reading not one but five works of fiction that manage this feat, with real fidelity to the tangled and arduous experience of leading an examined life.
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.
