When she first sleeps with Arnold, Ida is 30, an editor and playwright, married with two young children. Arnold, a 39-year-old academic known for his Brecht translations, is also married – to a woman younger than Ida, with whom he has a three-year-old son – and he insists that he “cannot cope with another separation.” To make matters worse, she lives in Oslo and he in Trondheim. Nevertheless, Ida falls passionately, obsessively and manically in love with him.
In a soaring outburst that oscillates between anger and admiration, pain and passion, If Only tells the story of their relationship. As Ida’s family later lament, she “challenged” this madness of her own free will and “decided not to let it go.” But for Ida, it’s “just like that.” Her body made the decision for her. From the moment they meet, she sees herself as “meant only for him. The only person in the whole wide world. The emptiness in her body, the cave of her vagina, created only for him, her lover.”
Such candor is not unusual in Vigdis Hjorth’s women’s novels. In 2019, Hjorth rose to prominence across the English-speaking world with the publication of Will and Testament, Charlotte Barslund’s riveting translation of Hjorth’s 2016 novel about a family torn apart by a real and psychic legacy. The story is told by a middle-aged woman who believes she was sexually abused by her father as a child.
The book was already a bestseller and a cause célèbre in Hjorth’s native Norway. The belief that it was an autobiography disguised as fiction was fuelled by the objections Hjorth’s real family took to it. Her sister Helga, a lawyer, even went so far as to write her own volume of retribution, a novel in which a family struggles with the false accusations of child abuse made by the narrator’s melodramatic sister in one of her books. Will and Testament has been translated into 30 languages, nominated for America’s National Book Award and featured in various book of the year lists here in the UK. Hjorth has been compared to the most famous Norwegian literary truth-teller of recent years, Karl Ove Knausgaard.
If Only is the third Hjorth novel that Barslund has translated into English following the success of Will and Testament—previously Long Live the Post Horn! (2020) and the International Booker Prize-nominated Is Mother Dead (2022)—but it is the earliest, originally published in Norway in 2001. Reading Hjorth’s work out of chronological order, as those of us who don’t read Norwegian must do, has its drawbacks.
Though not dissimilar to Is Mother Dead—a novel about a mother and daughter “bound together by pain and anger,” a description that could also apply to Ida and Arnold the longer they stay together—If Only lacks some of the spare precision of Hjorth’s more recent novels. It’s a looser, more meandering narrative; frustrating at times, as the drawn-out back-and-forth between the lovers becomes oppressive. It also lacks the nuanced connection of the personal and the political found in both Long Live the Post Horn! and A House in Norway—the first of Hjorth’s novels, translated back into English by Barslund in 2018, two years after its Norwegian publication. In the latter, a bourgeois textile artist’s treatment of her Polish single mother and daughter, to whom she rents an apartment, reveals the hypocrisy underlying the noble, left-wing ideals she publicly professes. Long Live the Post Horn!, meanwhile, traces the unexpected politicization of a media consultant as a result of her work with the Norwegian postal workers’ union.
The radical element of If Only is of a different kind. Hjorth rejects the age-old adultery narrative of a woman torn between her desires and her role as wife and mother. Ida is so mad about love that everything else – her work, her friends, even her own children – becomes background noise. She may tell herself that her love for Arnold “cannot be compared” to the love she feels for her children, but the text itself speaks a different language. She does not use the names of her son or daughter until halfway through the novel, and even then only because she finally introduces them to Arnold. He is the sun around which she and everything in her life revolves.
“Love is a surgeon. It cuts you with a knife. It cuts off lumps of flesh,” we are told. Images of circumcision and violence are omnipresent in Hjorth’s prose: even during lovemaking, the couple must “stitch their bodies together with a sharp needle.” Read alongside contemporary stories of toxic relationships that revel in fire and anger – Sarah Manguso’s new novel Liars, for example – If Only may seem less radical, but it should be remembered that it would have been more groundbreaking when it appeared in Norway two decades ago. Everything that gets on my nerves here – the claustrophobia and repetition, the endless torture the lovers inflict on each other – is precisely what makes Hjorth’s novel so remarkable and terrifyingly successful.
If Only is published by Verso for £12.99. To order your copy for £10.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
