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Repetition: A Novel. The subtitle matters. When Vigdis Hjorth’s Will and Testament was published in 2016, the relationship between the life of the author and that of her protagonist was the subject of a national scandal in Norway. Her fictional character, Bergljot, is a middle-aged magazine editor struggling to come to terms with the sexual abuse she suffered as a child at the hands of her father. Hjorth’s family, from whom she is estranged, have stridently repudiated the novel. Vigdis’s sister Helga Hjorth even published her own novel to offer an alternative family portrait.
In response, Hjorth has emphasised that the subtitle of Will and Testament: A Novel explicitly flags its fictional nature, and that however close the resemblances, Bergljot’s family is not hers, as the differences in names signify. All the more conspicuous, then, that Repetition refuses to name either its narrator — a successful novelist of exactly Hjorth’s age — or the narrator’s parents and siblings. The line between memoir and fiction here is wafer-thin.
Only six of Hjorth’s 20-odd novels have been translated into English (all by Charlotte Barslund). Repetition’s narrative will nevertheless be all too familiar to readers of Will and Testament. The new novel begins and ends with the middle-aged narrator alone in her cabin reflecting on the past. Most of the story, however, consists of a retrospective account of her first sexual experiences at the age of 16, with heavy hints that these experiences sowed the seeds for her eventual recovery of traumatic memories of abuse.
In both books, the teenage narrator excitedly records in her diary how she will be transformed when she loses her virginity the next weekend, only for her sexual partner to fail to perform. Not wanting to disappoint her diary, the narrator writes a highly explicit account of a longed-for but never-experienced sexual encounter. The father is shown the diary by the mother and sent into profound turmoil. Not only minor details of this narrative but exact phrases are recycled from one novel to the next — most notably the father’s anguished pronouncement that “it isn’t easy being human”.
Hjorth’s intense preoccupation with repetition directly shapes the style of her prose. Bare statements of facts are reiterated many times over the course of a novel, while sentences repeat the same phrases with minor modifications in rapid succession, as though striving to grasp the essence of an object by probing it from every angle. Such repetitions, which spotlight the things we tell ourselves to make manageable feelings and desires that would otherwise be unbearable, are at their most poignant when they confront experiences that are simply too devastating for language to contain.
Repetition incorporates both a playful recognition of Hjorth’s reuse of material, in the narrator’s remark that she has “alluded to” its central incident “in a few novels,” and a tacit justification: “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.”
Such reliving and retelling is central to Hjorth’s compelling psychological portraits of traumatised protagonists, as Repetition’s haunting final pages bear out. Nevertheless, the interest of the book’s narrative is significantly diminished by its familiarity, not least the negation of any suspense that might be roused by hints about “a much bigger secret.”
Readers engrossed by the similarities between the protagonists of auto-fiction and their authors will be fascinated by Hjorth’s minor variations on the same theme. Others will feel that their time would be better spent reading another novel.
Readers new to Hjorth, meanwhile, would be rewarded by starting with the more wide-ranging and ethically probing Will and Testament or with Long Live the Post Horn! — her tragicomedy, published in English in 2020, about a PR consultant who unexpectedly finds existential meaning in her unfulfilling job in the wake of a colleague’s suicide — rather than this latest work.
Repetition by Vigdis Hjorth, translated by Charlotte Barslund Verso £10.99, 144 pages
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