Vigdis Hjorth & Catherine Taylor: Repetition
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Welcome to the London Review Bookshop podcast. To find out about our upcoming events, visit LondonReviewBookshop.co.uk forward slash events
Good evening, everybody, and welcome to the London Review Bookshop. Tonight, it is a pleasure to welcome Vigdis Hjort and Catherine Taylor. Vigdis is the author of over 12 novels in Norwegian, which are steadily being translated into English by Charlotte Barsland. Long Live the Posthorn, Will and Testament, Is Mother Dead, and If Only, the latter two of which we also held events for here at the shop. It is such a delight to have you back this evening to celebrate the publication of Repetition. Thank you for being here, and indeed, welcome back. In conversation with Vigdis tonight is Catherine Taylor, writer, critic and former deputy director of English PEM. Catherine's first book, The Stirrings, won the 2024 TLS Ackley Award for memoir and life writing.
Thank you both so much for being here tonight. And further thank yous to everyone at Verso as ever. And a huge thank you also to NOLA, Norwegian Literature Abroad, for making tonight possible. The order of service for tonight is as follows. Victius and Catherine will be in conversation for about 45 minutes, following which there'll be 15 minutes of audience questions. I'll have the roving mic. Following that, there'll be plenty of time to get books, get them signed and such like. That's all for me. Thank you so much. Thank you.
Thank you. I wonder if someone could lend me their watch since I don't actually. Claire's got the thumbs up. I'm so pleased to be talking to you about your new novel in translation, translated by Charlotte Bathland, Repetition. Figtus' work has been described as devastating, ruthless, compulsively readable, and hypnotic by critics. I think that is an absolutely true representation of this book as well as her other novels. On the surface, it's a very ordinary story of a 16-year-old girl living in a small town in the mid-1970s. She's at school, she has friends, she wants to meet boys, just a very normal teenager. But at the heart of this is a very difficult family situation in which her mother particularly acts as if the daughter is corrupt, about to be corrupted, but perhaps already corrupt.
So the girl who has no real thoughts of rebellion naturally starts to lie to her parents. And the events of the weeks that follow this November 1975, when the weeks that are written about in repetition, remain in the memory of the older woman. An older woman, a writer, who lives pretty much in solitude. And so they're triggered by a visit to a concert. And she sees a girl with her parents who reminds her of that person that she once was. And then the memory comes back.
Yes. That's the genesis of how you came to write Repetition.
Not because it's fiction, of course, but still this story is very autobiographical and I have written about it. I've touched it many times before. So this is a kind of repetition. But, you know, when we have experienced things in our past, especially in our youth, that comes back. And, you know, again and again, I think that these stories, even though we are used to telling them in one way, we can them. I used to tell about my first time sleeping with a guy. I have made a way of telling stories. But maybe when it's coming back and coming back, it wants to tell you something and tell you something maybe about yourself or your past situation. And maybe it wants to tell you something about yourself that you don't really know.
you don't want to hear. It's insisting in a way. And, you know, I have never taken this... I have always been telling this story, the main story in this novel, as a very funny story, because in one way it is very funny. But when, you know, when it has been coming back and coming back, I understood finally that it's a very... traumatic story in one way who was very life changing for the 16 year old girl that I was yes so that's why you know I'm trying to tell it in the way I haven't told it before not a funny way but to take the young girl I was seriously at least at least
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