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In Vigdis Hjorth’s International Booker-longlisted Is Mother Dead, an estranged daughter ruminates on the nature of filial love while stalking her mother in a desperate attempt to break their relationship stalemate. Complicated love is again centre stage in If Only, Hjorth’s latest novel to be translated from her native Norwegian into English, except this time the infatuation is sexual.
Ida is a 30-year-old playwright with two young children. “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.” This is how Hjorth introduces her third-person protagonist, via another crisp, cogent translation by Charlotte Barslund.
Divorce is looming even before Ida meets Arnold Bush, a 39-year-old married Brecht translator, at a seminar one February. Ida invites him back to her room where “they try to make love”, in what will prove to be the start of their tumultuous affair.
Spring is on the way, as is trouble. “You can be aware of your capacity for love before you meet your beloved. Sense your potential for passion before you experience passion itself . . . The spirit sleeps in stones, it slumbers in plants. It awakens in animals, she is about to become an animal,” Hjorth writes, her dispassionate prose providing a sharp contrast to the uncomfortable drama that unfolds.
Hjorth told a London Review Bookshop audience in 2022 that she writes to explore “personal or ethical dilemmas” ranging from complicated family relationships (she doesn’t see her mother or sisters) to painful affairs. She has written more than 20 novels, suggesting she has a lot to unpick, but was little known outside Norway until her 2016 bestseller, Will and Testament, hit the headlines for more than its literary merit.
Hjorth’s fictional claims that the main character, Bergljot, was sexually abused by her father as a child prompted an angry response from her real-life family and sparked a debate over “reality literature” in a country that is also home to Karl Ove Knausgaard. (One of Hjorth’s sisters refuted the claims in a novel of her own, while Hjorth’s mother threatened to sue a Bergen theatre for its stage adaptation.)
If Only was originally published in 2001 and foreshadows some of the themes of Will and Testament. Like Bergljot, Ida, who avoids her father and siblings, suffered a “childhood trauma”. She frets about why her daughter is on edge. “Does he go to their daughter’s room at night?” Ida wonders of her own husband, a man who originally “saved her” from her family.
But it is the serially unfaithful Arnold who emerges as the true villain, as the author constructs a portrait of a psychological and physical bully in this dark novel, which is an uncomfortable but addictive read. “Look, he dances with another, Tove Ditlevsen wrote. And yet I don’t leave. Because suffering is a link that brings the magical pleasure happiness can never deliver,” Ida thinks, comparing her situation to Hjorth’s literary hero, the Danish author who wrote about her experience of an abusive spouse. The beauty of If Only is in the way Hjorth underscores how often love and suffering are bedmates. “If only there was a cure, a cure for love,” Ida wishes. If only, indeed.
If Only by Vigdis Hjorth, translated by Charlotte Barslund Verso Books £12.99, 352 pages
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