‘Back then, of course, I didn’t know my parents were locked into an impossibility even greater than mine. That I was living in a crime scene.’ So writes the narrator 48 years after the strange events that unfold in this bitter, brief, shattering novel.

But what was the crime? Is the narrator the victim? Is her controlling mother’s hysteria over perfectly normal adolescent exploits explained by the fact that the father had abused his daughter? Is the narrator in truth Vigdis Hjorth? And is this book then the Norwegian novelist’s harrowing memoir? Is autofiction really fact in a cunning mask? Is all fiction waiting to be decoded into reality? Like the police, Hjorth doesn’t do answers.

Instead, near the end of the book, a teenage girl shows up, barefoot, freezing and orphaned, in the snow outside the narrator’s Norwegian cabin one November night, howling like Cathy at Heathcliff’s window. The girl is the narrator’s younger self. ‘She had been crying out to me for decades: Talk to me! Comfort me! Offer your hand of salvation, throw me a lifeline, pull me up!’ Folded finally in her older self’s embrace, time suspended, the successful novelist narrator holds her spectral younger self.

Is autofiction really fact in a cunning mask? Is all fiction waiting to be decoded into reality?

But what happened? One night, aged 16, the girl came home after her disappointing first sexual encounter with a boy. Instead of recording the flabby reality of Finn Lykke’s attempt to deflower her, and his absurd post-coital whispered boast ‘Now I’ve made a woman of you’, she writes in her diary her fantasy of what she wanted to have happened: ‘On paper I did everything I would never have dared to do in a real  bed… I wrote and wrote, filled my enormous void with words.’

It’s hard not to read Repetition as disguised autobiography, unlocking the door to explain such fabulous novels as Will and Testament, Is Mother Dead and Long Live the Post Horn!, in which Hjorth depicts women who, despite their evident insecurities and inadequacies, are thrillingly, hilariously and cussedly at odds with what is expected of them. But that, no doubt, would be reductive.

When the father finds the diary it drives him out into the night, to return only when thoroughly plastered and in a kind of existential psychosexual meltdown – to be comforted by the narrator’s mother. Through the walls, in a drunken wail, is heard that Strindbergian line: ‘It isn’t easy being human!’ It certainly isn’t. But the couple bury the crime, whatever it has been, and live on in terror that their novelist daughter will disclose it in her books.

In truth, she had already done something more devastating:

They still don’t know what I wrote in my secret diary wasn’t true, that it was made up… The effect of my first fiction, however, and the horrorit caused, taught me a life lesson: fiction can have a greater impact than the truth, and be more truthful.

This is a heartbreaking book, be it fact or fiction.