If Only

Starred review from June 3, 2024
A love affair consumes a Norwegian woman’s life in Hjorth’s breathtaking latest (after Is Mother Dead). Ida Heier, a 30-year-old editor and writer, is married with young children when she sleeps with Arnold Bush, a 39-year-old married professor and Brecht translator. To Ida’s surprise, their subsequent exchange of letters awakens strong feelings: “She has never felt like this before, she is in love.” A tumultuous romance begins, with Ida imploring a reluctant Arnold to be with her. Arnold eventually leaves his wife, and Ida divorces her husband. However, the two aren’t faithful to each other, and their only happy times occur during weekends away or in bed together. The volatile relationship cycles for years between bouts of “howling, screaming, breaking things, fighting, hiccupping sobs and passionate lovemaking. Drunkenness and arguments, then confession and someone’s childhood wounds.” 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.