This is my second Vigdis Hjorth novel, the first was Is Mother Dead. It is interesting to read one of her earlier works, a book that is considered a masterpiece in Norway, as I don't think If Only is as polished as Is Mother Dead. Regardless, this book gave me a lot to think about and I will be mulling over my thoughts for the days to come!!

Early in the novel, Ida thinks something along the lines of "If only they were together..." And, then after many infidelities and arguments and physical abuse and the shattering of many dishes and the consumption of so much wine and beer I was worried for their livers, she thinks to herself, "If only it was over."

One of the things that I found fascinating about this book is how Ida and Arnold embody their identities as lovers. Though they are both parents, and creatives, and active in their careers, nothing is as important as their desire to satiate their hedonistic impulses. I found myself engrossed with this relationship even though it was repetitive. In some regards, I think that was the point. Reading this book is like listening to your friend obsess over someone who isn't giving them the time of day. It amazes me that Ida saw anything in Arnold: an aging professor of German who frequently sleeps with his students and juggles multiple women! She let him get away with so much!!

This book is best summed up by a line from the narrator: "Their tragedy wasn't that they didn't get to be together, it was that they did." (49%)

(While reading this book, I was reminded of Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux and Kairos by Erpenbeck.)

“Don’t fall in love with me, you’ll suffer.”
“I want to suffer!”
~ If Only

"If Only" is a well-articulated exploration of perpetual emotional chaos. There's a pungent presence of sophisticated melancholia. The combination of woman in peril, infidelity and contagious loneliness has never missed the mark of yielding promising literary premises. "If Only" paints a kind of love that is a thankless chore, one that only lynches off your sanity and persistently pushes into oblivion—a love that makes you want to leave yet compels you to stay, systematically torturing your very being. The novel centers around a woman who is so viciously in love that, at times, it feels nauseating to go even through with this novel. She's trapped in an unending loop of desperation and delusion. She is thoroughly consumed in her own idea of love. Her obsession and lapse of judgment might be a poetic tragedy but it is still tragic. The disturbing tendencies of her character make her unlikable, but at the same time, they make her realistic. Humans in reality are rarely reasonable with their hearts; we want things even if it's not in the right context and obsess over things that are self-destructive. Perhaps we are primitive in nature. We inherently crave chaos and keep deluding ourselves to justify our self-inflicted injustice.. Hence, we are blindly attracted to heartbreak like a moth is attracted to flames. The abundance of vulnerability in "If Only" is undeniably overwhelming. It is brilliantly written. It captures the raw, poignant and chaotic essence of destructive nature of human desire.

The blurb for this book - a new translation of a novel by Vigdis Hjorth (first published in 2001, in Norwegian) - sadly suffers, it seems to me, from certain delusions of grandeur. If the promotional copy were to be believed, this is a 'passionate' and 'ground-breaking' tale of a young woman's 'yearning' and heartbreak: recommended for fans of Coco Mellors, comparable in its 'potency' to the work of Annie Ernaux, and with the 'scale and 'force' of a Leo Tolstoy classic. Having actually read it, however, I can say that the reality does not quite live up to well-marketed fantasy; the novel's ability to match the talents of the referenced authors is, ironically, reflective of its title: 'if only'... The style of prose is uninspired, and in turn uninspiring (impaired in part by the occasional clunky, grammatical error), and the dialogue feels wooden, rings hollow. No aspect of these characters felt 'passionate' (in fact, the opposite seemed true - frankly, the novel's various narratives were sluggish, dull, and lifeless from start to finish).

If it had aimed its ambitions slightly lower, perhaps I would not have felt so cheated by the lacklustre reading experience - either way, this just didn't resonate with me (in fact, it made me wish I was the kind of person who DNF-ed)!

Thank you to Verso and NetGalley for my e-Arc!

I couldn't finish this book due to being bored and not interested in it. There were also a bunch of spelling/ formatting issues, which made for an unpleasant reading experience.

This is a complex story of what it means to lose yourself as a woman in this world. We follow Ida, who is dissatisfied in her marriage. When she meets Arnold at a conference, her whole world is turned upside down. Ida is infuriating, the way she bends to Arnold. That it is a man who defines her. She is obviously more into him than he is into her, and seeing what little self worth she has is heartbreaking. The stream of consciousness style is a little hard to get into, and all the back and forth of her wanting to leave and then caving really drags, but I kept reading to see if she’d finally find her inner strength. I think a lot of women will see themselves in this novel and though it may be hard to watch when Ida is at her lowest, it’s only through the pain she endures that she is able to find herself and the woman she was always meant to be.

I couldn’t finish this. I was so bored by her behaviour. I couldn’t work out why she thought that she loved Arnold who was neither particularly attractive or interesting. Was it because he told her that he was not going to leave his wife and she saw it as a challenge?