This potent novel by award-winning Norwegian writer Vigdis Hjorth narrates a doomed, adulterous affair between a man and a woman, accompanying its female protagonist – a writer named Ida – as she surrenders herself to a seemingly bottomless pit of abjection in the name of love, a Norwegian novel about a passionate and destructive love affair.
The novel If Only by Vigdis Hjorth, first published in Norway in 2001, is considered the cult author’s most important novel.
It’s the story about a relatively young woman, aged thirty. She married in her early twenties, had two children. It is winter. January and minus 14°C, white, frosty mist around the parked car, around the spruces, the mailbox on its post, but higher up the sky is blue, clear, the sun has come back. She has written in her diary that she is waiting for the heartbreak that will turn her into her true self. She has an impending sense of doom or possibly her own death.
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Vigdis Hjorth is an artist of the desperate and the broken. Spanning nearly forty years of publication, her novels have come to be associated with “scars,” “wounds,” and “psychological warfare.” Hjorth’s three previous works in English have all been released through Verso, and all translated by Charlotte Barslund.
Is Mother Dead (2023) presents a woman dangerously obsessed with her mother; Long Live the Post Horn! (2020) follows an alienated public relations specialist, haunted by the suicide of her colleague, who finds herself reinvigorated by her work resisting the privatization of the postal service; 2019’s Will and Testament, perhaps the novel best known to Hjorth’s English readers, recounts, through the kind of slippery autofiction made famous by fellow Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard, the story of a woman who accuses her father of having sexually abused her as a child. In a 2019 New Yorker profile of the author, Lauren Collins writes that Hjorth “forces us to regard bleeding souls.”
Now out in English for the first time, If Only exposes the tragedy of both longing for and attaining one’s love object. Can passion be mistaken for love? When Ida meets Arnold, also married, at a conference, she impulsively invites him to share her bed. She returns home, already half-obsessed, and the dissolution of her marriage and break-up of her family pass almost without her noticing.
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After writing to each other for a couple of months, they meet again in early June where they spend a night and an afternoon together. They still write, but more rarely now, it is the summer holidays and besides, it has become too serious, potentially uncontrollable, but they can’t help themselves. They meet a few times that autumn, but it only becomes more dangerous, more difficult, they have to end it, they end it and don’t see each other until May, at her insistence, the following year. By then she is divorced and living on her own.
“An absorbing study of inner turmoil … gripping” wrote the Guardian
“Addictive … The beauty of If Only is in the way Hjorth underscores how often love and suffering are bedmates” wrote Susie Mesure, Financial Times.
A Norwegian Novel About a Passionate and Destructive Love Affair, reported by Tor Kjolberg