If Only
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
