The Norwegian writer, Vigdis Hjorth is well known for novels that centre protagonists (mostly women) who are on the edge of disaster, or recovery from one. From Will and Testament that was nominated for the US National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2019 to Is Mother Dead? that was longlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize, Hjorth has garnered an international readership for her compulsive prose. Her latest novel, Repetition, translated by Charlotte Barslund, centres a middle-aged writer who is looking back at her traumatic teenage years.
Repetition begins with a middle-age woman waking up in a cabin on a cold November morning while it is still dark and going out for a walk with her dog. She retreats to this cabin ‘after busy periods of activities such as events and literary festivals, in order to rest, to read, to catch up on sleep and to dream.’ The only light guiding her path is the LED on her dog’s collar. As she walks, rests, and dreams, she thinks of her life almost 48 years ago when she had turned 16. She states in the novel’s first paragraph that she does not want to revisit that time and is desperate to forget it but the fear and pain return. With this, we plunge into her past and the days that changed her.
Hjorth writes in a tone that suggests disaster and despair. Over 144-pages, she convinces the reader of her protagonist’s volcanic past and ensures that they don’t look away. Her writing, in Barslund’s seamless translation, is majestic from the very beginning. It reveals the deeper intricacies of the protagonist’s being both as a woman who confronts her past self, and as a writer who has made it a responsibility to show and reveal through her fiction while continuously wondering if it is truth she has been telling through her books.
{{/usCountry}}Hjorth writes in a tone that suggests disaster and despair. Over 144-pages, she convinces the reader of her protagonist’s volcanic past and ensures that they don’t look away. Her writing, in Barslund’s seamless translation, is majestic from the very beginning. It reveals the deeper intricacies of the protagonist’s being both as a woman who confronts her past self, and as a writer who has made it a responsibility to show and reveal through her fiction while continuously wondering if it is truth she has been telling through her books.
{{/usCountry}}Hjorth has stated that Norway’s Dag Solstad is one of her major literary influences so it is unsurprising that his essence graces the novel, albeit faintly. In Shyness and Dignity (2006), Solstad presents an Ibsen scholar who is suddenly caught in an existentialist quagmire both at work and in his domestic life. He tries to get out of it by thinking about it. Hjorth’s unnamed protagonist in Repetition seems to be caught in a conundrum from her teenage years that she intends to emerge from decades later. Hjorth avoids being carried away by a linear style. When the novel shifts to the protagonist’s younger self, the change in the narrative voice is palpable. It is this that continuously registers in readers’ minds as they shift from the present to the past. This continues until the two blend together by the end and become almost inseparable.
Despite its short length, the story is capacious enough to capture a 1970s Norwegian girlhood. The reader meets a family that appears indistinct but carries within it the vestiges of conflict and hatred. The mother is obsessed with controlling the eldest daughter, the protagonist. She worries that the girl might ‘start smoking, drinking, sleeping around, go off the rails, go to the dogs’. Had it been just that, this would have been a cliched story of a maniacal mother. The protagonist writes: ‘her anxiety was contagious… I was starting to believe it myself… I wondered if she suspected some kind of darkness in me and she made me suspect it too.’ It is here that the reader, who has grown curious about this deep ingestion of parental anxiety, becomes truly hooked. The mother’s continuous emotional manipulation (‘My heart is breaking, she said. You don’t know how my heart is breaking’) whenever the protagonist attempts to enjoy herself with friends propels the tale toward something far more ominous. The violence that unfolds with every outing she lies about, the budding romance that she fights to hide, and the disappointments that eventually accrue builds the novel into a heartbreaking tale.
Before the recollections begin, the protagonist writes, ‘Repetition is the whole point of life… hugs you tenderly, but never constricts or swamps you.’ This is how she resists memories that keep filling her with a pernicious dread. Her past comes alive with her memories of the helpless young woman she once was; a young woman who was lost in examination, in seeking permission, in seeking salvation. But from whom was she seeking it? From the family? Her mother? Herself?
Hjorth’s novel may appear simple on the page and the reader may want to finish reading it in one single sitting. But the issues that she is highlighting require slow reading. Indeed, they make the reader want to think through the story, and with it. Few writers have been as capable of writing women and their making and unmaking.
Rahul Singh is a novelist and an academic. His debut novel is Unfolding.