Literature and Fiction2017 · 320 pp
If only
Vigdis Hjorth
The playwright Ida Heier has met the love of her life: the professor Arnold Busk, who is ten years her senior. Both are married and have children. For several years she pines for him to let go of his family for her. But when he does their relationship moves toward the extreme, an obsession that borders on madness…
«A great, tragic romance novel that hits the reader like a high-speed train.»DAGBLADET
«With the novel If only Hjorth steps up a division. It is written with the blood of her heart, and might be her best novel.»VG
«By the end of If Only, Hjorth reworks that old aphorism: unhappy stories are all alike. It’s the ones that eke out a kind of happiness that set themselves apart. 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.»Full Stop (US)
«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, 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
