Vigdis Hjorth’s If Only is about Ida, a playwright and radio dramatist in Oslo, who falls into an affair with Arnold, a married translator of Brecht.
What begins as an intoxicating rupture from domestic life becomes something more humiliating, repetitive, and annihilating: love as compulsion, love as theatre, love as a locked room with very nice lighting and no exit sign.
Hjorth is very good at the particular madness of wanting someone who cannot quite meet you, but keeps appearing just enough to keep the wound professionally maintained. The novel tracks Ida’s obsession over years: marriage, motherhood, theatre work, letters, travel, self-abasement, fury, and the awful private logic by which a person can mistake intensity for destiny. Not a cosy Scandinavian love story, then. More like someone has taken the romance plot out to the shed and asked it some serious questions under a single bulb.
A strong one for readers of Annie Ernaux, Rachel Cusk, Gwendoline Riley, Elena Ferrante’s more obsessive registers, Deborah Levy, and anyone interested in desire, self-deception, artistic women, bad attachments, and the embarrassing gothic architecture of longing.
First English-language Verso edition, first impression paperback published in 2024, translated from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund. Originally published in Norwegian as Om bare in 2001. Good second-hand condition.
