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If Only
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NYPL's Best Books of 2024
A groundbreaking, potent novel about the destructive force of romantic love from award-winning writer Vigdis Hjorth
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.
Reviews
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I read Vigdis Hjorth’s If Only at the subway station, then on the subway, then in the airport, then on the plane across the ocean, then in the taxi after landing, then finally in the hotel. I can’t separate the feeling of movement and travel from the feelings that book gave me: the vertigo of falling disastrously in love with exactly the wrong man, being shunned by him, taken up by him again, suffering from the love, and all the twists and turns of the relationship which the book depicts. The passage of time in that novel, and the passage of moods through the protagonist’s mind and body, mixed with my passage from one continent to another, and across time zones, feeling dizzy with sleeplessness and jet lag, were perfectly suited to each other. It was one of the best reading experiences I’ve had.
, The New Yorker -
The novel offers neither redemption nor transcendence as its resolution. And yet Hjorth makes this relationship and its aftermath legible to us as a part of the human experience-one that we can't extract from the type of love we do consider desirable or healthy. At the end of the book, we might find ourselves wondering, as Ida does: 'If only there was a cure, a cure for love.' And we might realize, even as we wish this, that we don't actually mean it at all.
, The Paris Review -
An absorbing study of inner turmoil ... gripping
Guardian
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Addictive ... The beauty of If Only is in the way Hjorth underscores how often love and suffering are bedmates.
, 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.
, Monocle -
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.
, 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.
, 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.
, 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.
, 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.
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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.
, 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.
, 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.
, 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.
, 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 -
A claustrophobic, wincingly real rendering of one woman's against-all-odds romantic obsession and the superhuman strength it affords her to demolish and rebuild her world.
TANK -
There is no neat, tidy resolution to be found here ... but it is in this space of psychological rumination and the excavation of what many would prefer hidden from view that Hjorth's writing is at its best.
, Frieze -
A purging of a volatile affair ... every paragraph end [feels] like a desperate gasp before launching back into Ida’s fixation.
, The Big Issue -
Vigdis Hjorth’s novels are like major fires, destructive and difficult to contain.
, Literary Review -
The framing device of If Only – the older narrator’s ... terrifying belief that to be hurt is somehow necessary, strengthens its powerful sadness
, Times Literary Supplement -
You’ll find yourself swept with the swiftness into the centripetal swirl of Vigdis Hjorth’s breathtaking and formidably focused novel in the opening pages of If Only.
, Art Spiel -
[Hjorth makes] self-destructive love into an addictive literary style.
, Granta, Books of the Year 2024 -
A modern classic ... If Only is about a horrendous relationship, but it’s also about a woman’s slow process of self-discovery.
, London Review of Books -
This pell-mell collision, the madness of love, which never ceases to shift, surprise, and constantly reassert itself in the lives of the people involved, is rendered in full in Vigdis Hjorth’s novel If Only, recently translated into English by Charlotte Barslund. It is a book that’s impossible to put down, with each episode, each chapter of its central romance dragging its reader deeper into this same, wild madness of its protagonists.
, Cleveland Review of Books -
Hjorth is such a daring, original, sneaky writer. She sets her books like traps, their existential questions camouflaged under a layer of shaggy, rambling prose...[Hjorth] has a gift for depicting painful, confusing, and mortifying relationships, putting them under a microscope, showing us more and more.
, New York Review of Books