Repetition by Vigdis Hjorth

Repetition / Vigdis Hjorth
trans. from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund
NY: Verso Books, 2026, c2023.
144 p.

This is a short novel by Hjorth, featuring a narrator looking back at her 16th year, when her home life is constrained by an overbearing, demanding mother whose extreme anxiety overshadows the narrator's experiences. 

She has a group of girlfriends that she is able to still do normal teenage things with, if she organizes and hides their activities under a shell of studying in 'no-boy' zones. But of course they are really going out to parties and getting drunk and making out with random older boys. 

Our narrator finds herself a boyfriend of a kind, and they make out a few times, with one of the most awkward sex scenes ever concluding their short-lived relationship. This is discovered by her parents, causing a violent, emotional flare-up, and a permanent crack in their family life. She is isolated, even though she still lives at home for a few more years, and kept from a relationship with her siblings as well - there is nobody to talk to and get any sense of their interpretations of the parental behaviours. 

There is a dark secret in the family past that this book circles around, avoiding naming it although it's clear to the reader. This shorter story is another approach to the story told in Will & Testament, and probably has more resonance if you've read that one. But it does stand alone, and the atmosphere of the story really evokes the suffocating sense of being 16 and in uncongenial circumstances, testing things out, trying to find yourself, understand life, and so on. The title is reflected both in the repeated routines of her days, and of the repeated family patterns shown through the story. The writing also reflects this, with certain phrases and images used again and again. 

I found it absorbing, as a real character study with lots of internal movement even if the outer world seemed static and repetitive. Really interesting.