Repetition
A Novel
Published on 3. March 2026
Book
Paperback/Softback
144 pages
978-1-80429-894-7 (ISBN)
Description
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.
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 / Votes
Hjorth writes with the feminist bluntness of Annie Ernaux, the psychic precision of Javier Marias and the lyrical repetitions of Jon Fosse. -- S.C. Cornell * The New York Times * 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. -- Madeline Gressel * Parapraxis * This slim, powerful novel could be spoiled by too much information, but lingering too long on the 60-something narrator's encounter with a teenager that makes her remember her own teenaged self - seems too simple. The title matters both as style and theme, as the unnamed woman recalls the past with uncanny accuracy. As she says, 'I repeat and recall and relive and retell and redress because. . . [the] future is an ongoing process.' -- Bethanne Patrick * Los Angeles Times * Repetition offers [Hjorth's] most sustained attempt to imagine the parents' morally compromised existence... In the absence of a good officialdom that can help children, Hjorth offers a good witch who can hold them. -- Elaine Blair * Harper's Magazine * Hjorth writes sublimely about the wonder and subjugation of life as a teenager-what it feels like to be a girl with friends, to live in a place that's lovely even in the cold and the dark. And she can be very funny ... 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. Terrible things happen in families, in history, Hjorth seems to be saying, but that's not so remarkable. What's remarkable is that these people, who used to be us, existed-that, day after day, they actually lived like this. -- Honor Jones * The Atlantic * A novel about the power of memory, as well as writing, empathy, and imagination, Repetition enacts the kind of reckoning with our past selves that we might have should we be brave enough to return to them. * The Los Angeles Review of Books * Hjorth's repetitions are her way of refusing to be silent in the face of abuse, especially after a crime that is so often met with disbelief, the victim nitpicked and her motives scrutinized...Some of the most important fiction being written today. * Baffler * 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. -- James Folta, Most Anticipated Books of 2026 * Lit Hub * Vigdis Hjorth's novels are like major fires, destructive and difficult to contain. * Literary Review * The novel's pages are filled with her anxiety about interacting with her family members and the anger and devastation that comes every time these hopes are dashed. Repetition is as morally uncompromising as Will and Testament, but it is also a calmer novel, focused on analyzing the past. * Electric Literature * Vigdis Hjorth is one of my favorite contemporary writers. * Sheila Heti * Hjorth writes vividly of the narrator's teenage confusion and pain, and her lifelong search for comfort. [Repetition] swells with emotion. * Publishers Weekly * Hjorth's Repetition is as concerned with repression and the unconscious as it is a manifesto on the power of writing. * PopMatters * Adolescent memories provoke a chronology of embedded emotions in this eloquent, penetrating novel. * Foreword Reviews * Far from lightweight ... A short but seismic read with shades of Annie Ernaux. -- 11 Of The Best New Books To Read This Month * The Gloss * Bitter, brief, shattering ... This is a heartbreaking book -- Stuart Jeffries * Spectator * Hjorth is very good on the anxieties of girlhood and the threshold of maturity. -- Oonagh Devitt Tremblay * Times Literary Supplement * In Repetition, award-winning novelist Vigdis Hjorth explores, through fiction, the parts of childhood that echo through the decades. * SheerLuxe * 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 * BookForum *More details
Series
Edition
Paperback original
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 196 mm
Width: 125 mm
Thickness: 12 mm
Weight
136 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-80429-894-7 (9781804298947)
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Persons
VIGDIS HJORTH is the author of over a dozen prize-winning and best-selling novels. Will and Testament was nominated for the National Book Award, Long Live the Post Horn! won the Believer Book Award for fiction in 2020, and Is Mother Dead was longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2023.
CHARLOTTE BARSLUND translates books and plays from Norway, Denmark and Greenland. She has translated five of Vigdis Hjorth's novels, including Will and Testament and Is Mother Dead.
CHARLOTTE BARSLUND translates books and plays from Norway, Denmark and Greenland. She has translated five of Vigdis Hjorth's novels, including Will and Testament and Is Mother Dead.