Sandwich Joe

I’m so uncomfortable.

Repetition is a novel that trusts its reader completely, and that trust is the whole mechanism. Hjorth’s prose is cool, controlled, and almost affectless… and yet the emotional weight is immense, because she has engineered it to live nowhere except in you. The reader supplies it. The reader completes the text. By the end, you realize you’ve been doing the same interpretive work as the narrator herself, assembling meaning from fragments and silences, never quite arriving at the thing itself.

The dual temporality (a woman in her sixties reconstructing her sixteenth year) gives you two unreliable narrators stacked on top of each other. The girl who couldn’t see what was happening. The woman who may not want to. Hjorth never resolves the distance between them, and that irresolution is precisely the point.

It took me a few days to figure out what to say about this book. For good or ill, it did make an impression.

I’m not sure what I can add to the discourse that hasn’t been said already. Like many other readers, I feel that Yesteryear suffers from a lack of good editing. The premise is solid and intriguing, but the execution of the idea falls flat. For example, I’m disappointed at the lack of Burke’s deep research into Christianity, or Natalie’s underdeveloped character.

That said, I did fly through the book, and, despite its faults, I can see why it might be the book of the summer.

While the story is beautiful, the art is simply divine.

Tonally very strange, but a solid haunted house tale nonetheless.