REPETITION, recursion...refashioning...recasting....

REPETITION
VIGDIS HJORTH (tr. Charlotte Barslund)
Verso Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Prize-winning novel by one of the foremost writers of her generation, explores the horror and beauty of being sixteen-years-old.

In a Norwegian November, when it is dark at waking and dark at sleeping, a novelist in her sixties sits next to a teenaged girl at the opera, and through their padded jackets feels a dreadfully familiar tension conducted from the parents seated on her far side. She thinks back to her sixteenth year. The year she first got drunk and the year she first had sex with a boy. A year of being circled by an anxious, hawkish mother and, at a notable distance, her silent father.

The year her family made an unspoken decision, and an unspeakable sacrifice.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: "Repetition" and "repetitive" have pretty negative connotations in literary discourse. We'll generally reach for "recursion" (the older term by nearly two centuries) and "recursive" to move the affect into a more positive light. Most of this very short read I was leaning towards grousing about repetitive prose making me feel kinda seasick, like Invisible Man always has; I've never managed to finish the read because of it. This being a novella there was no time for me to get really, really tired of it.

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?

Early on, we're told there will be repetition, and it's the bloody title of the story; I cannot whinge that I was blindsided or misled. As I said in my review of Is Mother Dead?, "'Do I confront my deepest self?' asks Johanna, our narrator, in a passage that honestly sums up the entire experience of reading Author Hjorth's writing," an assessment I equally happily apply to this read.

But that repetitive prose...it was not until the Big Reveal about three-quarters into the read that I realized we were in recursive territory, we were shading there all along, as every iteration of the memories our narrator, a woman of my age, recalls her sixteenth year's events and feelings, alive now to their emotional and practical freight in a way impossible to a sixteen-year-old.

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.

Knowing what you don't want to know is corrosive. It destroys happiness, safety, even selfhood dissolves in its caustic bath. I should know, it's been my reality since 1982.

I was not primed to feel the shock of this story's revelation, then, but rather to bear witness with the narrator. The very best gift to give her is to be with her on her level, in her time, without drama that draws the focus away from her.

I rewrite and I reproduce like Munch painted several versions of The Scream, I repeat and I vary the repetition, shamelessly, with my heart on my sleeve and suffering inevitable heartburn in order to process and understand and put it behind me or to reinforce the bitterness and excitement inside me, in order to change myself through repeating and varying patterns . . .

Recursion, in other words. That's a word mostly used in math or computer science, occasionally someone trots out Chomsky's no-longest-sentence reasoning; but mostly this word is treated like it's wearing a starched white lab coat and a pocket protector (is my age showing or what?) in my opinion quite unfairly. This story is the most recursive thing I've read this year and proudly so. It's the zoomed-in fractal of trauma. It's the infinite capacity of language to iterate until the reader's eyes bleed. In under 150pp.

Truth is always hard to endure. This novel is truthtelling, degrading and repugnant truths told like it or not. The reason I think you should read it is simple: You can put it down. You can take some time to get your head around it. You can, in a pinch, apply the Pearl Rule.

Unlike life.

Facing truth as it's told is hard and it costs you many hard-to-lose things, like illusions and the warm loving comfort of being lied to. Practice in a novel; think about how the second person works as a narrative device; put your chest in the narrator's poking finger's path.

Imagine if there is no choice afforded you.

Welcome to the ugly side.