An almost perfect portrayal of childhood to adulthood bd the transition between the two. It’s not incredibly melodramatic, it’s honest and meaningful.

I had a hard time getting through this book initially but did end up enjoying it. I found it hard to follow at some points. In the description it felt like I would really like it but I don’t think it was the book for me.

At its core, the novel is about youthful longing, self-discovery, and vulnerability. Hjorth uses repetition, as the title suggests, both in structure and in theme: we revisit the same events and feelings from slightly different angles, showing how they linger and echo through a lifetime.

The prose is spare, emotional, and searching. Rather than telling a linear story, Hjorth explores the intensity of being young—the shame, the confusion, the moments of freedom, and the weight of other people’s expectations. It’s less about external plot and more about the inner life of a girl becoming an adult, and how those formative years leave marks that never quite fade.

Short and fierce. A difficult read, as you feel for this protagonist with every sentence. I will read more from this author!

I've read every Hjorth book that's been translated into English, and this is up there among my favorites. It's stressful but in a good way! Will definitely recommend to friends and library patrons.

This was a heart-wrenching book. It perfectly depicts the anxiety, pain and hardship that comes with being a 16 year old girl. The cold setting echoes the interactions the narrator endures. I could not put down this beautifully sweet and tense story of emancipation.

My only qualm with this book was the writing,
I assume that translating Norwegian is difficult and this is a personal issue. I will admit that the culminating event at the end wasn’t pursued in depth and was quite unexpected to the plot.

Small but mighty, Repetition packed a hefty punch and left me almost knocked-out.

After a deceptive, not very captivating introduction, Repetition reveals to be a one of a kind, gut-wrenching, coming-of-age novel. I think I finished it in two or three days, because I felt out of breath the whole time and needed to escape the haunting tension, the only way being to flee through it, almost exorcise it.
As the main character remembers a specific time of her adolescence, we are forced to witness with her the harshness of her home and the abuse she went through when she was still just a child. The narration balances out quite well the resignation of a teenager who doesn't realise the depth of what's happening, and the introspection of an adult who has now no choice but to frontally face the trauma that ended up shaping her life. This combination makes Repetition a devastating read as well as a meditative, almost soothing one at times. It is a very powerful rendition of adolescence, and maybe of the first steps of healing. I was mesmerised by it's capacity to offer both the worst of her family life, alongside the excitement of breaking the rules with friends, the playfulness of dressing up for a party and the butterflies of first love. The writing matched this paradox perfectly, it was never naive or cheesy and gave the story all the gravitas and respect needed, yet it also managed to slip in beautiful sentences. It was not only easy to feel everything that was happening, you have no other choice to be fully immersed in it.

3,75/5

A big thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the arc!

"Repetition is the whole point of life. Hope is like a new garment –stiff, tight and glittering –but until you try it on, you won’t know if it fits or suits you, while memory is like an old garment: no matter how pretty it is, it no longer suits you, you’ve outgrown it. Repetition, however, is like a durable garment that hugs you tenderly, but never constricts or swamps you. I was glad that I hoped for nothing, but why then this feeling of dread?"

Repetition is Charlotte Barslund's translation of Gjentakelsen by Vigdis Hjorth, the 6th of the books by the translator/author pair that I have read (see below) and one which can be seen as a companion piece to some of her previous work, the controversial Will and Testament (2019), from Arv og miljø (2016), in particular.

The 64 year old narrator begins the novel in the present day, in November 2013, staying in a cabin in the woods surrounding Olso, one to which she retreats to read, rest, dream and recover after busy periods, such as the literary festival circuit:

"Anything you want to forget will come back to you, it will haunt you so vividly that it feels as if you’re going through it all over again, often causing you the same overwhelming and unmanageable feelings as it did the first time; you fear the intensity might kill you and so you fight its return, you resist, but you can’t prevent or shield yourself from the pain that 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?
...
I had travelled the length and breadth of the country that autumn talking about the relationship between the novel and real life, a theme that had accompanied me all the years I had written fiction and which I was used to discussing, but I had started to feel increasingly lost and subdued. I would often stay silent and during the last event I wondered if I was losing my mind."

Going to a carol concert by a orchestra back in the city - in part to support a friend, but for her part of the comforting ritual of repetition (see above) - she finds herself sitting next to a 16ish year old girl, there, obviously reluctantly, with her parents and senses the tension between them and the girl's anxiety.

And this triggers a memory of herself, in November 1975, 38 years earlier, having just turned 16. She was at an age where she was just starting to experiment with drink and with sexual fumblings with boys, but with a mother who is highly, and overly, suspicious of her activities - more so that with her brother and two younger sisters. Indeed she feels it was her mother's suspicions that actually created the desire within her (shades of Romans 7:7–8, although the verse isn't quoted).

But above all, looking back, she realises that her mother's suspicions were themselves rooted in fears of something that may have happened earlier in her life, unspoken and unacknowledged but the source of the tension between each of the trio of her and her parents (as she also senses in the 2023 concert) and which also puts a different, retrospective, cast on her father's seemingly supportive and laissez faire frequent admonition of his wife to "oh, leave the girl alone!".

"She was suspicious and she had cause to be, but I didn’t know that at the time –though I had an inkling that not everything was as it should be with me –that something lived deep within me, was working away in me, and if it led to confirmation, then what? She was looking for signs of something she simultaneously suspected and feared, desperately hoping not to find anything in order to be reassured and so far she hadn’t found anything, but still she didn’t feel safe, because she didn’t know what she was looking for. She wanted to get rid of her unnerving, intrusive suspicion of what might have happened to me by finding evidence that would prove her suspicion was baseless, but seeing as that was impossible, she sought instead to prevent the potential consequences of what she suspected and feared but didn’t actually want to deal with, from a twisted belief that it was possible to do so by smothering me, by forcing me, by nudging me into acting and behaving like a healthy, normal teenager. Only she didn’t realise that her hysteria and fear ultimately suggested and homed in on the very thing she didn’t want to know."

What this is is not explicitly spelled out, but clear by inference, and indeed also from Will and Testament. That earlier novel became controversial on the extent to which it was auto-fictional and here the narrator tells us, after her parent's discover her diary with its exaggerated imagined portrayal of what happened with a 18yo boy:

"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."

One I think to read alongside Will and Testament, but powerfully compact and with intense prose.

Bibliography in English - all translations by Charlotte Barslund
A House in Norway (2017) translated from Et norsk hus (2014)
Will and Testament (2019) translated Arv og miljø (2016)
Long Live the Post Horn! (2020) translated from Leve posthornet! (2012)
Is Mother Dead (2022) translated from Er mor død (2020)
If Only (2024) translated from Om bare (2001)
Repetition (2025) translated from Gjentakelsen (2023)

I was grabbed by the premise but sadly I was unable to really sink into the book. While this book was not for me, I hope that it finds it audience!

Thank you NetGalley for a ARC copy of this book.

I started this book a week or so ago, swiped randomly through the pages and thought about DNF'ing because the sentences were so so long and repetitive and I didn't really care about this random girl's normal adolescence. Instead I waited, and today I read it all in five or six hours. Now the long sentences just felt anxiogenic as I was trying to know what happened, like I was running behind the author, and there was something very creepy about this girl's adolescence after all. I liked it very much and will definitely read more of this author in the future.

One of my favorite reads of the year and my favorite from Vigdis Hjorth so far. An unsettling but realistic look at girlhood and growing older, finding a first obsessive love, and having an overbearing mother that does not want to see her little girl grow up. Often showcasing a toxic tale that bends the line between reliable and unreliable narrator, Repetition tells a non-linear story about the repetitive nature of growing up in our society.

A gorgeous, moving novella by an incredible writer. I've never encountered anything quite like it. Read it without knowing anything and get lost in the prose.

navigating life for a 16 year old girl is never easy, but is particularly difficult with a complex relationship with her parents. this is a pensive, tense, and silent novel of a 60 year old women reflecting on her life as a teenager. a quick and reflective read.

This is an interesting short novel about a young girl coming to grips with aging and sexuality and the demand and desires of her family. It was easy to get lost in and keep turning pages, but I often feel with works of translation that I’m not getting the full context or gravity of a story. The big event mentioned in the summary felt like it came out of the blue and glossed over pretty quickly. I enjoyed this book but it left me wanting a little more.

A short and reflective book written in what english-lang readers can comfortably call a Scandinavian rhythm. It deconstructs the coming-of-age novel, first by positioning it as from the POV of an (otherwise alone) middle-aged woman who has a wordless passing encounter with a teenage girl who is crushed beneath the weight of her parent's authority; second, by reminiscing on her own coming-of-age (as characterized by her relationship with her mother, losing her virginity, other such genre staples) and then pinning it to moments which happen before and after, the "true" story. Multiple times the author alludes to the fact that the shallow boy meets girl story is the fictional one though it must be told to unearth the darker truth beneath it.

This is a telling about not just familial sexual abuse, about hierarchies between generations and genders, but about the 'repetitions' which bring you closer to a truth... though not necessarily one which resolves anything. The truth is elusive and intimacy lacking because something is never quite bridged. I found the relationship between mother and daughter most compelling (it is never a positive one) but the mother's complex web of complicity, subservience, inferiority, and resentment is really well characterized in her relationship to the father, which only is revealed in the last fourth of the novel. In fact I might even say the helpless but never passive mother is the main character of this book. She is the person the reader spends the most time figuring out.

Quietly devastating, I was for the most part lulled into a mild interest through the clever use of repetition. Similar to the main character, the reader starts to release things and the impact is what makes this short book so impressive
… fiction can have a greater impact than the truth, and be more truthful

To be completely honest, for two thirds of Repetition I was kind of bored, in how we followed the 16 year old main character and her first small steps towards independence and sexual experience. Her mother is overbearing, even described as hysterical, but hey, isn't that what any teen would think about their parents? Only later on we feel that the mother is indeed very protective and hence brings about rebellion in our main character (Her fear created me because fear and imagination go together & …she didn’t understand she fed what she was trying to prevent). These are however baby steps and the life of the main character seems to go round in circles. The impact of surveillance and mental issues of a parent on a growing teenage girl are sever, the emotional weight of things is clear. Patterns are repeating themselves in bringing up your kids. The book in a way feels very Annie Ernaux in the clinical way it describes how it is to grow up as a girl into a woman.

But then there is a revelation that puts the whole narrative in a different light and the way Vigdis Hjorth pulls of a harmony between what the main chacon realises and how I as reader responded to the narrative was deeply impressive to me. While reading I was feeling some unease, the mother seemed too unhinged, the four siblings never get into focus. But I was lured in and the whole book is brought into a new light, leaving the reader to ponder on: The mystery isn’t the ways of the world, but the fact that the world exists at all
Repetition in this section is incredible and moving and terrible and I hope this book finds a large audience.

Unfortunately I didn't really gel with this book and didn't like the writing style. I couldn't get into it at all.

Hjorth’s writing reminds me a lot of Annie Ernaux. This is about coming-of-age, memory, the sense of urgency felt in the teenage years, and loneliness. The majority of it (and it is not a long book) is set within one month of our narrator’s life, back when she was sixteen. The character work here is so precise, with the narrator, her mother, and her father feeling like real people and their relationships filled with an intensity that mimics a slow-building panic attack. The theme of repetition is one that comes back (which you’d expect from the title), but I never felt like that aspect of the writing was tedious - the writing flows so well, I just let myself be swept along for the ride. This cover is also so stunning. I love!

Repetition is a quiet, hypnotic read that sneaks up on you with its emotional weight. Hjorth has a way of writing that feels both deeply personal and universally relatable, pulling you into the narrator’s inner world with almost unsettling intimacy. The prose is spare but charged, every sentence carrying more meaning than it first appears. I found myself lingering on certain passages, not because they were hard to understand, but because they felt so raw and unfiltered. There’s a rhythm to the storytelling—true to the title—that makes the reading experience almost meditative. Even when the subject matter turns heavy, Hjorth’s voice remains steady and compelling, keeping you tethered to the page. It’s a book that asks you to slow down, pay attention, and feel the echoes long after you’ve closed it.

Repetition provides a poignant commentary on how a single event can shape a child and her family. As the narrator moves back and forth through time, new experiences trigger the reemergence of repressed memories. Although the past may be murky, it still leaves an imprint and influences thoughts and actions. The story is a heartbreaking reminder that those whom we trust most have the power to hurt us most severely.