Literature and Fiction2023 · 144 pp
Repetition
Vigdis Hjorth
Will and Testament meets Fifteen Years in this new novel by Vigdis Hjorth.
She is a grown woman going for a walk in the dark woods, with her dog. She’s also a sixteen-year-old. The view the grown woman offers her younger self, is tender and beautiful. It’s about being kissed for the first time, the incredibly clumsy, funny, and painful act of doing it for the first time, it’s about feeling the intoxication spread throughout your body at a party with some boys in a terraced house, about running through the woods to prepare for a marathon, about feeling a huge hunger and thirst in your young life.
All while her mother watches over the young girl like a hawk, her father keeps away and holds a low profile. The father’s distance is notable, the mother’s close watch involves control that is normally unheard of. Because, as the novel reveals on its first page, there is a big and dangerous secret in their house.
Anything you want to forget will come back to you, it will haunt you so vividly that it feels as if you are going through it all over again, often causing you the same overwhelming and unmanageable feelings as the first time; you fear you might die from the intensity and so you fight its return, you resist, but you are not able to prevent or shield yourself from the pain which follows and so you are forced to relive it. However, when it has been re-experienced and relived yet again, when the paralysing pain subsides, you will often find that you have gained a fresh insight into the significance of that particular memory; it was the reason it came back, in order to tell you something.
Why do I write you when I mean me?
WINNER OF THE CRITICS AWARD 2023
WINNER OF THE YOUTH CRITICS AWARD 2023
NOMINATED TO THE NORWEGIAN BOOKSELLER AWARD 2023
NOMINATED TO THE BRAGE PRIZE FOR BEST WORK OF FICTION 2023
«… intense and insistent, so tremulous and pounding that it sometimes is painful to read.»
«... a pain and an intensity that has resulted in a condensed masterpiece.»
DAGBLADET, six/six stars
Shockingly good!«Ah. How she writes, Vigdis Hjorth. […] Who can as Vigdis Hjorth write a novel in 143 pages, so hauntingly vivid about a 16-year-old girl - about her demanding life in a divided family.»
«As a novel it is great and intense writing, the best of Vigdis Hjorth.»
VG, six/six stars
«Vigdis Hjorth has always been good at describing the hope, despair and loneliness of teenage girls, how awkward one is in both emotions and in practice. She is also good here.»
ADRESSEAVISEN, five/six stars
Repetition is amongst her decidedly strongest
«What's the point of the repetition – to write about mother's control and a failed sexual debut - once again? The question is incorrectly posed. There is not just one point here. Repetition, the novel, and the content of the title itself, the repetition, overflow with new, fresh points. Something urgent is still at play.»
KLASSEKAMPEN
«Vigdis Hjorth strips the narrative free of unnecessary slag, and makes the 16-year-old in her shine.»
NRK
Blows the reader away
«… it wouldn’t surprise me if this novel remains as a highlight from the book year 2023.»
AFTENPOSTEN
Sometimes one has to repeat oneself
«Vigdis Hjorth writes with an unmatched power about trauma, truth and story-telling.»
VÅRT LAND
Explosive uneasiness
«A grown-up writer looks back to high school, and the early and fumbling attempts with boys, home-alone parties, smoking and drinking in secret, but something isn't right. It should be wistful and sweet, all of it, but instead the little novel vibrates from the first page with an explosive uneasiness that eventually blow up.»
DN
«Yes, it may be shameless to place yourself side by side with Edvard Munch and his screaming angst painting, which entered the art history in 1893, exactly 50 years after Søren Kierkegaard's book about repetition. However, Vigdis Hjorth gets away with it unscathed. All which has been lost, all which has been reclaimed, all that is human, all the aesthetic, all of it she has preserved in the masterly and awe-inspiring little novel, which in part sheds light over Will and Testament and Is mother dead, and in part is a moving and shocking novel about liberation and coming-of-age in one's own right.»WEEKENDAVISEN (Denmark)
«... Vigdis Hjorth – one of Norway's most famous and notorious authors of the so-called autofiction – writes so that you believe in the core of the story. Once again, she has written a strangely haunting novel about daring or precisely not daring to admit one's own and others' worst lies.»POLITIKEN (Denmark)
Deemed one of 2023s best books by:
VG: «An outstanding novel by Vigdis Hjorth. Rhythmically repetitive – in beautiful language and exquisite form – about a raw family drama about a family that's being divided. The main character, a 16-year-old girl, experiences everything she should when that age, attraction to boys, erotica, experimentation – and simultaneously a harrowing tug of war between mother and daughter. Is this Hjorth's best novel?»
Aftenposten: «Repetition is a short, feverish novel, told in a persuasive style that immediately draws the reader in. With tremendous intensity it drills in on that which the narrator calls "the occurance".»
Vårt land
Morgenbladet
