Generational Recurse

It was only after Vigdis Hjorth’s father died that family estrangement became the central subject of her fiction. Prior to that, she wrote children’s books and novels about romantic obsession that the Norwegian press dismissed as erotic and intellectually lightweight. These family dramas changed her standing, earning her long lists for the National Book Award for Translated Literature and the International Booker Prize. Her latest novel, Repetition, in which a novelist in her sixties reflects on her own teenage sexual awakening, might suggest a return to earlier territory.