Read and discuss literature with our Nordic Book Club Online! On December 10, we’ll be discussing award-winning Norwegian author Vigdis Hjorth’s If Only, a groundbreaking yet timeless early work now out in English translation by Charlotte Barslund.

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. 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, 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.

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