Repetition

A 60-something writer revisits her stormy adolescence and painful family secrets in the devastating latest from Hjorth (If Only). Prompted by a chance run-in with a distraught teenage girl and her parents during a symphony concert, the unnamed narrator retires to her cabin in the country and reflects on her time as a 16-year-old student in 1975 Oslo. The oldest of four, she was the only one of her siblings subjected to her mother’s overwhelming and seemingly baseless anxiety. While out with her close girlfriends Unni and Helle, she met a boy named Finn Lykke, and the two began a fumbling adolescent romance. As the narrator reflects on the episode, she remembers sensing an inexplicable dark undercurrent to the excitement of partying and young love. After a failed attempt at sex with Finn, she fictionalized the episode in her diary, portraying it as one of passionate lovemaking. Her mother read the diary and confronted her, and their stand-off revealed deep fault lines within the family that remained a mystery to the narrator until years later, when a traumatic memory came to her “like electric shocks through my brain, lightning-clear.” Hjorth writes vividly of the narrator’s teenage confusion and pain, and her lifelong search for comfort. This swells with emotion. (Mar.)