Review: 'Repetition' ('Gjentakelsen') by Vigdis Hjorth, trans. by Charlotte Barslund
Pub. Date: 03/03/2026
Publisher: Verso Books
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.
I have read a few of Vigdis Hjorth's books now, both in Bokmål and in translation. She is a very intriguing person to me, which is helped by the fact that many of her books seem to blur the lines between the author outside the book and the writer inside the book. In 1967 literary scholar Roland Barthes published an article called 'La morte de l'autor', or 'The Death of the Author'. This article was crucial to modern literary criticism as an academic discipline and a general practice. In short, Barthes argues that we should not rely on the author to give us the ultimate and correct interpretation of a text, but that we should the focus on each reader's own reception and understanding of a text. This might sound obvious now, but it was an important corrective for literary scholarship. It doesn't matter what an author themselves says about their text, you as the reader get to form your own ideas about the things you read. It also doesn't matter what other readers say, your own reception is valid. Now, of course, if you want to have nuanced and complex conversations about books it becomes interesting to draw in interpretations from other readers, historical context, what an author thought about their own work, etc. but this does not mean you have to change your own ideas on or feelings about the text. This is easily done for authors who lived in the past, about whom we have sparse or even no information at all, in short, authors who we can either project onto or dismiss. But what when the author shares our own time, is a public figure about whom things are known? This inevitably affects how you read their work and often this is a negative effect for me. With how Vigdis Hjorth writes, however, this interweaving of author and narrator is almost part of the art, making the reading of her books a complex but rewarding process.
Repetition begins with an author at a cabin. Now in her sixties, she has just come off a tour of various speaking events and now wonders what it is she has been writing and talking about. Keeping a promise to a friend, our author narrator attends a concert and finds herself seated next to a teenage girl and her parents. This encounter sets her off to think about her own youth, specifically a time in her teens when something fractured. She explores her tense relationship to her family, her mother's rising anxiety and its effects on her, and her experience with sex and alcohol. As she circles around her younger self, it becomes clearer and clearer that the narrator is working towards a realisation, towards the revelation of something horrid that has been kept a secret. I felt incredible tenderness for her younger self, especially as she described her mother's intense questioning and attempts to control her. There are some lines about the darkness our teenager feels mut be inside her, if her mother is so panicked about her, which hit very close to home. It is a dark and complicated story, but there is also an odd form of beauty here which emerges towards the end.
I find it difficult to read Repetition and not think of what I know about Vigdis Hjorth and what she has said and written about her family. The novel therefore feels autobiographical to me, which adds an extra layer of complexity to reading about what happens and happened to the teenager. The idea of repetition, of returning over and over to childhood and reliving it, thereby naturally altering how you feel about what happened, what you remember about what happened, and who you were then and are now, are elemental to this novel. Because of this circling, Repetition also is a difficult read for anyone who finds their thoughts also returning to things over and over again. This is enhanced by the deep anxiety and shame which seems to exude from the mother. While the bad thing that happened to the narrator relates mostly to her father, it is the tight control exercised by the mother, her deep panic and fear of her daughter, which seeped into me as I read. What I also liked, however, was how the purpose of writing, telling, and fiction came through. Sometimes the stories we tell are more real (to us, to others) than the things that really happened. How we choose to remember, how we speak, or not, of what we experienced, can be more powerful than a cold, hard reality. How Vigdis Hjorth has her narrator speak of fiction, of censoring herself and then being hit by her own words, realising what they revealed, is fascinating. A part of me does wish to read this without exterior knowledge of Hjorth, but I also think she is one of the rare authors where the melding of fiction and fact, book and world in fact enhances what she is trying to say.
I give this novel...
5 Universes!
Repetition is no easy read. It is a dark novel, not just because some of it is set in a cramped apartment or a cabin in the woods, but also because it reenacts the endless circling of thoughts as you look back on your own life. It is a masterful work, however, which deeply touched me.
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