People falling in love are generally no fun to be around. It’s not any better or worse if the object of their affection is lukewarm about the whole thing—it’s simply another flavor of intolerable. Vigdis Hjorth plays a ruthless game with this tolerance in If Only, a portrait of a woman consumed by a love affair that is both intoxicating and annihilating.
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. If Only is her oldest work so far to come out in English (Long Live the Post Horn!, Will and Testament, and Is Mother Dead were originally published in 2012, 2016, and 2020 respectively). When it first came out in 2001, it was already unmistakably Hjorth—at once stark and intimate, slipping at whim between first and third person and into her characters’ streams of consciousness. Her novels contend with relationships’ dark interiors, and tend to be marked by a sense of entrapment and emotional suffocation.
That’s certainly the case in If Only, in which radio playwright Ida gets caught in the gravitational pull of her obsession with Arnold, a Brecht scholar she meets at a conference. He’s an established academic nearing forty, with a twenty-five-year-old wife at home. He seems nonchalant about the prospect of an extramarital affair, and doesn’t feel the power imbalance the same way Ida does. “He critiques contemporary drama,” Ida notes, whereas “She writes it, she has only just begun.”
After a mediocre sexual liaison with this pale and skinny scholar, Ida’s life becomes a mere satellite to Arnold’s existence—in a few dozen pages, she’s compulsively checking his horoscope and taking expensive trips for the sole reason of sending him postcards. She walks clean out of her marriage. The spectral figures of her children look on as silent witnesses. Her conversations with nameless friends inevitably circle back to Arnold:
Do you, do any of you think he’ll come to me? Say yes. She sets traps for herself, hoping she will fall into one of them and lose control and it won’t be pretty.
Ida risks everything for a person hardly likable, let alone lovable. When Arnold doesn’t initially reciprocate her feelings with the same intensity, we’re left to wonder why a benevolent friend couldn’t cut her phone wires (this is 2001, and home telephones play a major role). Hjorth answers by reminding us how pleasurable such an unrequited love can be:
She travels in order to leave her thoughts behind, to think of something else, but it is no use, she thinks the same thoughts, perhaps she travels only so that she can think them in peace, she has no other thoughts and when the children, her husband aren’t near she can surrender to her thoughts without inhibition, her chest is pounding as if she were by the stage at a rock concert . . .
The gratification she feels is unmistakable—there’s no better feeling for Ida than to succumb to a yearning so intense it blurs pain and pleasure into one.
The narrative unfolds in a series of fragmented, dreamlike sequences in which we’re privy to Ida’s inner thoughts, her self-doubt, her longing, and her growing isolation. She dissects every interaction with Arnold in prose that is both rambling and clinical. It’s worth noting that almost everything we have of Hjorth in English we owe to translator Charlotte Barslund, who has spoken at length about how the author’s style captures the claustrophobia of educated, middle-class Norwegians. Her characters start from a place of boredom or complacency in their “near-perfect country.” Barslund notes that they’re often “privileged and articulate characters who understand their dilemma only too well, but fear that they might never find a way out.” This claustrophobia is baked into the text, which drags on in leggy, comma-spliced sentences across dozens of pages with not so much as a line break. The fact that the protagonist is also a writer makes for excellent wordplay (and an exhausting internal monologue):
Ida will be caught in the middle, trapped in the middle, it won’t work, she will never manage being Ida for the Dramatists Association and Ida for Arnold at the same time, it is impossible.
Her tendency to synonymize, edit, and refine ad nauseam makes her stream of consciousness feel like a mathematical proof—as if both author and translator are “showing their work” until they land the perfect word. Sometimes the repetition shows Ida’s thoughts parroting Arnold to herself: “‘I’ve missed you,’ he says. I’ve missed you, he says. They share a taxi . . . .” At other times, it keeps us caught in her one-track mind:
She carried children or pushed buggies with children around while she thought of one name. In the forest, by the lakes, bare-legged on the dusty road, she thought of only one name. She would lie in the grass, gazing at the sky while they climbed around her and on top of her, thinking of one name only.
It’s this style that makes it as difficult to leave as it is to stay, like any difficult affair. 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. How much will Arnold endure? How much will Ida endure? How much will we endure of them both, without a chapter break to sustain us, before abandoning the book out of exasperation? The narrator, whose identity is fuzzy (a wiser Ida, or Hjorth herself?) and whose contributions are sparse, even stops to ask, “Is it as tiresome to read as it is to write? Won’t something happen soon?”
By the time Arnold falls for Ida, the relationship is fraught, almost abusive. There are echoes of earlier works on the destructive nature of obsession masquerading as love but, unlike her predecessors, Hjorth scrapes her prose clean of any romance. We’re not led to desire Arnold as we might Anna Karenina’s handsome, charming Vronsky, nor do I believe we’re meant to want their love to be successful against all odds. They’re petulant, jealous, and prone to inebriation in order to withstand each other’s company; Ida riffles through his personal papers, Arnold throws tantrums if she speaks too long with another man. Neither brings out the best in the other.
While earlier works might explore the societal factors that contribute to destructive passion, If Only is more interested in interiority—a microscopic examination of the corrosive effects of obsession on the individual, not society. Beneath Ida’s fixation with Arnold is a deep undercurrent of neglect and emotional distance from the rest of her life. Her children become peripheral figures in her life, their needs often subordinated to her own desires. This neglect is compounded by the children’s own awareness of their mother’s preoccupation, yet Hjorth makes no judgments. She never condemns passionate love, though it sometimes feels as if she’s provoking the reader to decide how much damage a woman’s desire can inflict before we’re no longer able to resist those moralizing impulses. Maternal ambivalence is a recurring theme in Hjorth’s work, but she tends to leave the reader to grapple with their own biases. In If Only, we’re provided with a parallel to Ida in Arnold and left to see how our verdicts differ for men and women.
As I was gathering my own final thoughts on Ida and Arnold, a friend with impeccable timing texted me about the courtship rituals of bald eagles. Bald eagles generally mate for life, she said, and have an intense, rather acrobatic period of courtship that involves aerial chases and something called the “death spiral.” From a great height, the courting birds lock their talons together, then spiral back to earth at high speed, letting go precisely as they’re about to hit the ground. We cannot know for sure, of course, but scientists suspect the ritual is used to determine the fitness and trustworthiness of a potential mate. It sounds plausible (relatable even), particularly because it can end in tragedy. A pair of eagles may spiral down into electrical wires or other obstacles; sometimes, they don’t let go in time and plummet to their death.
A tailor-made metaphor: the name “Arnold” comes from the Germanic elements for “eagle” (arn) and “power” (wald). It became impossible not to read him as the doomed and scowling emblem of bruised masculinity, while Ida watched him walk away in those early days: “His naked head, his heavy reptile gaze, alone back to the hotel.”
If Only is more than just a story of love gone awry. “One plus one doesn’t make two,” Ida notes, “but more, many more.” Hjorth captures the allure of hidden desire and the thrill of the chase, but also the gradual erosion of self that comes with such a consuming passion. As Ida spirals deeper into the relationship, we’re aware of the cataclysmic end to come. Hjorth’s skill lies in her ability to prolong the inevitable, to draw out the tension until it becomes almost unbearable. For the reader, it’s suffocating: the title doesn’t seem to say “if only it could have worked out” but rather “if only they’d never met.”
If Only by Vigdis Hjorth, translated from Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund (Verso, 2024).
Copyright © 2024 by Hannah Weber. All rights reserved.
