Repetition
In Vigdis Hjorth’s taut, emotive novella Repetition, a Norwegian woman recalls her troubled teenage years and early sexual experiences.
While attending a University of Oslo symphony concert, the anonymous narrator observes a tense interaction between a teenager and her parents. Now a writer in her sixties, the narrator feels a surge of empathy toward the girl, who seems to be “trapped and paralysed” by her elders’ overbearing attention. Thus begin reflections upon her own turbulent adolescence.
The story is told through a series of impressionistic flashbacks. In 1975, the narrator’s mother was obsessed with the “teenage temptations” of alcohol, drug use, and promiscuity. Her preoccupation with her sixteen-year-old daughter became “frantic” and unsettling. Soon, feeling hypersexualized and constrained, the narrator began to rebel by drinking, lying about her whereabouts, and planning to lose her virginity as soon as possible.
The narrator also recalls moments of spirited liberation. Claiming to be busy with schoolwork, she and her girlfriends tippled from secret stashes of beer and cherry brandy, then walked to a party through “glittering” snow, “enveloped” in their collective “scent of lipstick and perfume.” Awkward yet exciting interactions with boys led to mutual explorations; though the narrator’s first sexual encounter was disappointing, she reimagines a more erotic version of the event in an explicit diary entry. Following the discovery of the “wicked” diary, her parents overreacted, deepening her family’s dysfunction.
With quick, galvanizing intensity, the narrator reveals a later, repressed traumatic violation. As she contemplates the “aftershocks” of this “unacknowledged earthquake,” the book shifts toward quiet healing and release. This emergence is gradual, however, and does not erase decades of internalized anguish.
Adolescent memories provoke a chronology of embedded emotions in the eloquent, penetrating novel Repetition.
Reviewed by
Meg Nola
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
