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Repetition:A Novel
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One of the foremost writers of her generation explores the strength and pain of being young
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 with haunting vividness, exposing a story both utterly familiar and desperately strange.
It was the year she first got drunk, the year she first had sex with a boy. She was watched like a hawk by an anxious mother and a silent, distant father. It was a year of typical teenage fixation and typical teenage frivolity, and of all the usual parental fretting. Until something else took hold, and her family made an unspoken decision and a terrible sacrifice. Only now, decades later, can these events come close to being comprehended.
In Repetition, award-winning novelist Vigdis Hjorth explores through fiction the parts of childhood that chime through the decades.
Reviews
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For Freud the ‘compulsion to repeat,’ as he called it, was an unconscious expression of what had been repressed by memory. Here, Hjorth brings that compulsion to life in prose, making the reader feel, at once, the desire to remember and the desire to forget, which battle it out on the field of memory. The novel’s explosive power comes from the tension between those competing desires, and its suspense comes from the presence of the unnamed trauma, which sits outside the family’s house like a hungry beast in the darkness…If Will and Testament shows us the process by which a repressed truth rises to the surface, Repetition shows us how it gets repressed.
, Parapraxis -
Hjorth writes vividly of the narrator’s teenage confusion and pain, and her lifelong search for comfort. [Repetition] swells with emotion.
Publishers Weekly -
This slim new translation from Verso is classic Hjorth: a deceptively simple family story unfolds into dark and painful corners. Told in direct in introspective prose, Hjorth is able to conjure the creaky overconfidence of adolescence and all its uncertainties.
, Lit Hub
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Adolescent memories provoke a chronology of embedded emotions in this eloquent, penetrating novel.
Foreword Reviews -
Vigdis Hjorth is one of my favorite contemporary writers.
Sheila Heti -
Vigdis Hjorth’s novels are like major fires, destructive and difficult to contain.
Literary Review -
The Norwegian author of Long Live the Post Horn! and Will and Testament has formed a formidable cult following.
Literary Hub