Repetition: A Novel Beauty and even decades

and even decades

Friendly lunches become stolen moments between the bookshelves

Because under that smug exterior is a heart he doesn’t want to show―one that was badly broken a decade earlier

fraying their already tense bonds

Repetition: A Novel Beauty and even decadesIn a Norwegian November, when it is dark at waking and dark at sleeping, a novelist in her sixties sits next to a teenaged girl at the opera, and through their padded jackets feels a dreadfully familiar tension conducted from the parents seated on her far side. She thinks back to her sixteenth year. The year she first got drunk and the year she first had sex with a boy. A year of being circled by an anxious, hawkish mother and, at a notable distance,