Repetition is a poignant and quietly devastating novella, following a writer reflecting back on her sixteenth year of life - a time renowned for getting in trouble, experimenting and self-discovery. Her experience is one steeped in lingering anxiety, living under a roof of suspicion. Her mother keeps an ever-watchful and suffocating eye on her whilst her father remains distant and silent.

This is a story of an outcast, eldest daughter sidelined and sacrificed by a dysfunctional family. It is a story of the body keeping the score, and of an unidentified weight that has not yet come to the surface. It is both heartbreaking, and marginally healing - with a narrator so full of empathy and a wish to understand herself and the people around her. Like others have said, for a short book this one will really leave you with a lump in your throat; Hjorth is a master in making your hairs stand on end on one page and tugging at your heartstrings the next.

Quietly devastating and one that will remain with me for a while.

An old woman reflecting on a year in her life at 16 and reconciling how much of her life now was shaped by those experiences. It’s a brilliant and familiar look your life at 16 and trying to find your place in the world.

So many elements of this book feel like repeating themes helping to create a flowing story and the last 1/4 really sucker punches you in the gut.

This is the first book I’ve read by Vigdis Hjorth and it’s taken me a while to reflect on the book and write this review. I think it’s very hard to rate and review auto fiction as who am I to judge someone else’s life experiences: I can only review the writing. Hjorth herself writes in this book; ‘The effect of my first fiction, however, and the horror it caused taught me a life lesson: fiction can have a greater impact than the truth, and be more truthful.’

This will appeal to fans of Karl Ove Knaussgard and Tove Dilitsen.

It’s a very short and intense read in which a sixty year old novelist relives her experiences as a sixteen year old girl on the cusp of womanhood against the atmospheric background of a dark Norwegian winter which really sets the mood of the book. It tackles subject matter that is very painful to the author relating to her troubled and troubling relationship with her parents. Hjorth is brilliant at getting under the skin of the girl and her experiences with her first boyfriend and there is a brilliant and quite funny description of their first sexual encounter. This is the only light relief in the book and this is not an easy read.

The novel’s title 'Repetition’ is significant. Not only is there repetition within the book as Hjorth examines the same events from different perspectives, but this is also a revisiting of the subject matter of Hjorth’s earlier novel ‘Will and Testament’ which I read after reading ‘Repetition’. As Hjorth writes: ‘Will you never let it go? No. I repeat and recall and relive and retell and redress because childhood lasts, youth lasts, our childhood and youth constitute a future that starts over constantly, it is an ongoing process'.

Whereas ‘Will and Testament’ read for the most part like a very raw stream of consciousness, I think ‘Repetition is the finer piece of literature as there is in Repetition’ more distance between the author and the events of her childhood which she describes so vividly and it feels as though the author is further along in her ongoing process of repetition and recollection described above. It is also much stronger in terms of narrative structure and pacing and reads to me like a very well constructed short story. I found the end of the book particularly moving, where Hjorth embraces her younger self.

If you are tempted to read either ‘Repetition’ or ‘Will and Testament’, I would recommend ‘Repetition’.

I don't think the cover of this book does it any favours.

Thanks to Verso Books and Net Galley for an ARC of this novella.

"Repetition" is a solemn ode to coming of age and all its nuances. It's a raw contemplation of the volatility of the formative years. The novel captures the poignant alchemy of adolescence and its inevitable descent into the growing sense of autonomy where everything feels so foreign yet inevitable. It captures the preciseness of being a teenage girl of an anxious mother: the guilt, the tug of war of loving her and despising her and above all, the heartaches. After all, what is a teenage girl without her heartaches and grudges she quietly holds against her mother? All in all, this was a delicious read. The pensive discourse of girlhood never disappoints.


Thank you, NetGalley, for the ARC.

This was such a beautiful yet devastating book. The author described anxiety and inner child healing in a way that I related to so much - I even found myself tearing up.

You think you have an understanding of the story but when you find out what’s really been going on it’s like a gut punch to the chest.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC in exchange for my honest review!

This short novel by Norwegian author Vigdis Hjorth (expertly translated into English by Charlotte Barslund) packs a lot of childhood trauma into its mere 144 pages. Hjorth's novel primarily consists of the main character's recollection of an unhealthy and strained relationship with her mother amidst the pressures of teenage years. The story and translation make for a compelling and quick read. Recommend reading.

Thank you to NetGalley and Verso Fiction for providing me with an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

A novelist in her 60’s attends the opera, and is seated beside a teenage girl. The tension between the teenager and her parents reminds the narrator of her own teenage years, and so the story begins. We follow the narrator through her sixteenth year, through her journey towards independence and her tumultuous relationship with her mother. Her mother is overbearing, protective in ways that causes the young narrator to be unable to form an idea of who she is outside of the anxiety projected onto her. She does not understand her mother, nor her motives, and so she struggles to understand herself. Tension lurks in the background of the story, the mothers panicked hovering combined with the narrator's grown up input combines to put the reader into a similar state of unease. A deep sense of sadness is carried through every line, one that reaches its peak at the reveal at the end of the book, shifting the entire trajectory of the story.

Hjorth does a wonderful job at capturing the absolute loneliness and horror that comes with being a teenage girl. Every page is fused with melancholy and yearning, the prose is beautiful. The author also perfectly depicts how it feels to look back on one's life, to wish you could infuse your child self with knowledge, and yet knowing you cannot take away the loneliness that seems to come with being a teenager. As a teenager, you feel alone in the world, and yet as you grow older you will see your younger self everywhere– like at the opera, sitting beside you.

This is a short book sitting at around 144 pages and yet it packs a massive punch. I devoured it in one sitting and was left with a hollow feeling in my chest at the end. A quiet and yet captivating book. I have posted this review on my Goodreads, and it will be on my TikTok (@elieverisokay) at the end of the month in my monthly wrap up!

It’s hard to review this not truly knowing the authors plans of execution in the writing style, whether it’s purposeful that it’s written so untidily and messy on purpose considering the teenage outlook. I found this book to be pretty un-captivating, and probably would’ve DNF-ed if not for its short length. Within this grown woman and then into teenage girl, apparently, we oddly go from moments of questionable and quite immature reasonings, to weirdly astute psychological insights, but all seemingly from the teen perspective, and it all felt to me very crooked and spliced, and unsure of its purpose. It wasn’t bad per se, but I felt like the language of the perspective character was almost nauseatingly all over the place. Ultimately, the whole book felt like a draft, while also being, as the title claims, very repetitive, without a kind of enveloping grander purpose.

Early access e-arc provided by netgalley.

An easily digestible lit fic that can have you keep on turning over to the next page. I loved the exploration of being a teenage girl and navigating your relationship with your parents. I thought the use of repetition as a literary device coupled with using it as a theme was clever.

A powerful work that reads more like memoir-essay than autofiction novel, I would say. Hjorth returns to similar debates (unanswerable questions perhaps) that tormented the narrator in “Is Mother Dead” but with less of a narrative arc, hence my feeling that the novel reads more like a “memoir-essay”. I was not convinced that the framing of the story of the narrator’s teenaged years was necessary—the “look back” by the adult narrator, as she sits in a cabin, but that’s just a subjective opinion (in part said because the opening is slow and not very engaging, but once the flashback narrative starts, of the narrator’s teenaged years, the work is extremely engaging, again slowing down when we return to the closing frame, the questions that have already been raised in other Hjorth works.) It’s a fascinating subject and she is an incredible writer, though I wonder if yet another book, if one is out there and will be translated to English in the coming years, exploring this subject more will be something I will jump on.

3.75 stars

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for my free digital ARC of the latest Vigdis Hjorth to be translated into English, courtesy of Charlotte Barslund. Even though I loved Long Live the Post Horn! I’ve neglected picking up her other offerings so far but, after Repetition, I’ll be rectifying that ASAP.

This is a claustrophobic account of a sixteen year old’s life, full of the usual teenage dramas, keeping up with friends, getting drunk for the first time, messing around with boys. But there’s something darker lurking under the surface. At home, the narrator struggles under the too-close eye of her mother, a paranoid woman who seems mistrustful of her daughter. The girl’s father is distant, while her siblings seem relieved when she’s out of the house.

I did find it a bit slow to start, and for a short book this isn’t ideal. But once we get out of the main character’s present and back into her past, I was gripped. There’s a subtle but chilling tension that builds until the end, at which point Hjorth delivers her final blow - and it is devastating.

A quiet book for sure, but it has impact. Another addition to the category: ‘being a 16 year old girl is a hellscape’.

Repetition is a wildly intimate close study of the relationships between child and parent - more specifically, the relationship between a mother and daughter, and overall, asks the questions: what does the word family mean, and how far would you go to protect what you perceive family to be? Hjorth's exploration of the problematic complexities and ensnaring tensions that encapsulate family members is chilling, palpable and insightful. There is an acute sense of awareness on every page of the minutiae that make up the interactions between individuals, pulling them apart thread by thread so as to understand the makeup of people- their quirks and flaws, their thoughts, feelings and sins.
Reading Repetition is a unique journey into how far we go to understand people; an endeavour to enter someone else's mind. Mother and daughter relationships, throughout history, have been scrutinised time and time again for their intensity and, at times, supposed viciousness. Complete with disturbing twists, Repetition reveals itself to the reader like a friend that knows far too much, far too many of your inner thoughts, when you don't remember sharing them at all.


Thank you NetGalley, Verso Books and Vigdis Hjorth.

This book was a compelling and enjoyable read from start to finish. The writing was engaging, the pacing kept me hooked, and the characters felt authentic and well-developed. It struck a strong emotional chord and left a lasting impression. Highly recommend to anyone looking for something thoughtful and impactful.

I liked the premise of this book, but I wasn't able to actually get into it at any point. I wanted to love it and I kept pushing through, but I could not get through it. I will probably pick this book back up in the future, but for now I will have to say goodbye

This had a bit of a slow start and the sentences were super long which I found kept breaking the flow, but once it got going I was IN. Great pacing and I was fully invested in the 16 year old life of our narrator. I was fine with just that but then the last quarter went straight for the sternum. I’ll be thinking about this for a long time.

This heartbreaking and devastating book is the first that I have read by the author and translator and I have absolutely no hesitation in giving it five stars.
A Norwegian writer in her sixties, seated beside an unhappy teenage girl and her parents at a pre Christmas concert, recognises an old familiar tension and is reminded of events during her own sixteenth year.

What masterfully unfolds, as the writer revisits her sixteen year old self, is a heartrending coming of age story in a tense, toxic and controlling environment.

Writing is the young protagonist’s refuge but it is also a catalyst to the events that lead to a critical turning point with her family. Her writing again comes to her rescue when she is at her lowest.

I was gripped by the beautiful, precise and insightful prose and the way the author deals with themes like suppressed memories, guilt, isolation, compromise and the power of fiction.

The ending circles back to the beginning and is extraordinarily powerful. I highly recommend this beautifully constructed short novel and will be seeking out other books by this author and translator.

I received a very much appreciated an early copy from NetGalley and Verso Books in return for an honest review.

I've been in such a reading slump lately and who knew the ARC sitting in my NetGalley shelf would be the one to bring me out of it? At first the story was kind of hard to get into but once I was hooked I enjoyed the author's writing style, it definitely felt different than any other I've read before. The story itself is amazing, "exploring the horrors and beauty of being a sixteen year old girl" speaks for itself! It shows the change from childhood to adulthood and this is most certainly a book I'll read over and over again for the type of comfort it brings me.

Rounded up from 4.5 stars.

Quite honestly, this was one of my biggest surprises of the year. The depth and nuance Hjorth (and the wonderful translator Charlotte Barslund) has captured of a fretful, traumatic adolescence of the narrator was quite frankly astonishing. This sort of style and introspection was already my sort of novel, but as the reflection comes slowly to the crux I read with a horrendous lump in my throat. Exceptionally moving writing, where not a lot of words can absolutely pack a punch.

Beginning with an older writer's almost emotionless and repetitious existence as an author, a moment at a concert prompts the rest of the novel's narrative; reflections on her troubled childhood with her neurotic mother and absent father, her tribulations with the development of the teenage self, with expression, with writing, the reliving of awkward sexual encounters, of young love and an ominous sense of propulsive anxiety, the narrator unfolds an eventually horrifying experience that has coloured her whole existence. The final passage was so deeply moving to me, I cried in a Cafe Nero.

What a book - a truly brilliant, atmospheric, dark examination of 'coming of age' - almost like an anti-bildungsroman - that I will always remember. Perfect for readers of 'The Discomfort of Evening' (Marieke Lucas Rijneveld) or 'I Who Have Never Known Men' (Jacqueline Harpman).

The story follows a woman who notices a young girl arguing with her mother. This encounter triggers memories of her own controlling, anxious mother and calm, distant father, as well as a pivotal year at 16, her siblings, friendships, and emotional experiences.
There is constant tension at home and in her relationships, felt both physically and mentally. The theme of repetition is very strong: thoughts, memories, and emotions continually return as the character tries to make sense of her past and process her experiences.
In short, the book explores how the past shapes a person's identity and emotional life, highlighting recurring patterns in emotions, actions, and experiences.
I recommend reading Will and Testament first, and then this book. This one truly moved me, just as Will and Testament did when I read it.

Another spectacular read by Vigdis Hjorth. Vigdis has such a visceral way of moving you through a novel, that left me feeling like I was the protagonist. This book follows a young girl growing up within a troubling household where she is surveilled by an untrusting mother and ignorant father. The story left me feeling unsettled through how nostalgic and realistic the actions and words of the mother are so closely related to how many young women grow up, including myself. Extremely insightful. Will be buying this ASAP.