If Only - by Vigdis Hjorth (Paperback)

About the Book

"Originally published as Om bare"--Copyright page.

Book Synopsis

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.

So opens Vigids Hjorth's ground-breaking novel from 2001, which melds the yearning, doomed potency of Annie Ernaux's A Simple Passion with the scale and force of Anna Karenina. It asks, can passion be mistaken for love? And proceeds to document the destruction a decade defined by such a misconstruction can yield on a life.

Review Quotes

"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."
--Sophie Haigney, The Paris Review

"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 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."
--Griffin Reed, 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."
--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

"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."
--Hannah Weber, 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."
--Vanessa Peterson, Frieze

"A purging of a volatile affair ... every paragraph end [feels] like a desperate gasp before launching back into Ida's fixation."
--Billie Walker, The Big Issue

"Vigdis Hjorth's novels are like major fires, destructive and difficult to contain."
--Morten Høi Jensen, 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"
--Alex Clark, 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."
--Paul D'Agostino, Art Spiel

"[Hjorth makes] self-destructive love into an addictive literary style."
--Kevin Brazil, 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."
--Toril Moi, London Review of Books

About the Author

Vigdis Hjorth is the author of over a dozen prize-winning and best-selling novels. Will and Testament sold 170,000 copies in Norway and has received several awards, including the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature and the Norwegian Booksellers' Prize, as well as being nominated for the National Book Award and Nordic Council Literature Prize. Long Live the Post Horn! won the Believer Book Award for fiction in 2020, and Is Mother Dead was listed for the International Booker Prize in 2023.