Repetition by Vigdis Hjorth, Translated by Charlotte Barslund
Selected by Elizabeth Gonzalez James
“Repetition is the whole point of life,” Vigdis Hjorth writes in the opening pages of Repetition, her latest novel to be translated from the original Norwegian, due out in March from Verso Books. “[Repetition] is the daily bread of life, its blessing fills you up.” It’s a bold declaration, especially since just one page earlier she tells us that our most painful memories are the ones most likely to come back around to haunt us. Is the pain the point, then? And what blessings are to be found there?
These questions hang in the background as Hjorth’s novel opens with an unnamed narrator attending a Christmas symphony and witnessing a disconcerting interaction between a teenage girl and her parents. This triggers memories of the narrator’s own teenage years and the difficult relationship she had with her overbearing mother. The mother suffers from the anxieties common to all parents of teenagers—worries about their safety, their judgment, their truthfulness—but the narrator’s mother’s fears seem peculiarly motivated, and are never able to be assuaged: “It felt as if she wanted to get under my clothes and under my skin and into my head in order to read my mind to learn what triggered her unbearable fear.”
“Perhaps this is the blessing in the repetition, that by reliving a moment again and again we can finally transcend it.”