If Only : a devastating story from a Norwegian author

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.

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. Arnold has a more relaxed attitude toward the affair. But neither his coolness nor the alarming talk she hears about him can dampen her desire. When she finally has Arnold for herself, all the surface niceties and indulgences they enjoy - travel, sex, beers for breakfast and cocktails for dinner - can't sustain the sweetness of the fantasy. Their mounting jealousies and insecurities metastasize, resulting in violence and addiction.

In urgent prose, with layers of candid and vivid detail, Hjorth shows just how devastating love can be when it binds the wrong people.

MEDIA REVIEWS

An absorbing study of inner turmoil ... gripping - Guardian

Addictive ... The beauty of If Only is in the way Hjorth underscores how often love and suffering are bedmates. - Susie Mesure, Financial Times

Cult author Vigdis Hjorth's most important novel ... If Only exposes the tragedy of both longing for and attaining one's love object. - Mia Levitin, Monocle

Vigdis Hjorth is one of my favorite contemporary writers. - Sheila Heti

A love affair consumes a Norwegian woman's life in Hjorth's breathtaking latest ... Hjorth's narration is both irresistible and exhausting, a headlong rush that describes and enacts Ida's feelings as she careens between love and hate for a man she knows isn't "worth the sacrifice." Like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, Ida has occasional flashes that she's acting irrationally, and Hjorth evokes the agony of her protagonist's self-entrapment to a devastating degree. It's an enthralling tale of passion gone to rot. - starred review, Publishers Weekly

Hjorth emerges once again, in this novel, as not only a chronicler of the bruised and bloody, but their champion, an author who grants her characters the power to author their own stories themselves. - Griffin Reed, Full Stop

Hjorth, the Norwegian novelist behind 2022's Is Mother Dead, painstakingly chronicles a 30-year-old married woman's all-consuming and volatile romance with a married man, which blurs the lines between passion and love. - Sophia Stewart, The Millions

The Norwegian author of Long Live the Post Horn! and Will and Testament has formed a small but formidable cult following in the US, and If Only should only grow their army. If Only starts off with enigmatic and addictive words of love and death that call to mind our favorite doomed affairs-painful and poetic, cursed and necessary, we must go back in time to understand how our heroine found herself on the brink, caught between passion and ruin. - James Folta, Lit Hub; Most Anticipated Books of 2024

Feverish and intoxicating, If Only is a novel about the depths of a life-altering devotion and the connections between love, creativity, and self-making. - Foreword Reviews

Who are we without passionate love, and do we need heartbreak to truly know ourselves? If Only chronicles one woman's questions of life, love and existence during a torrid love affair. - B&N Reads

Everything here that sets my teeth on edge - the claustrophobia and repetition, the endless torture the lovers put each other through - is exactly what makes Hjorth's novel so remarkably, and horrifyingly, accomplished. - Lucy Scholes, Telegraph

Hjorth's portrait of her heroine's madness nearly always teeters towards comedy, which is one reason the book, though depicting suffering and shame, is such a pleasure to read. - Stuart Jeffries, Observer

In form and function, If Only paints a vivid portrait of desperation ... And for what? For love? For lust? For nothing? The question is not answered. It's simply two lives laid out for ultimate destruction. - Frank Valish, Under the Radar

Already a leading and distinctive voice in contemporary Scandinavian literature, Hjorth is cementing her reputation abroad with this, her fourth novel translated from Norwegian to English.Hjorth dares us to keep reading, to hold out, to stick around for what we're sure will be a great redemption, or at least a spectacular breakdown. - Hannah Weber, Words Without Borders

Hjorth's new novel is a wild ride of extramarital passion between two literary people. As in her volatile Is Mother Dead, the fur flies here as a protracted affair becomes an Albee-like relationship rife with violent fights, endless pleading, alcohol-fueled arguments, and lustful make-up sex. - The Center for Fiction