title: If Only by: Hjorth, Vigdis published: 2024-09-03 read: 2024-09-31 preview

Have you ever been hopelessly in love? So much that it hurts? That you do anything? If so, this book is not for you. Unless you want to relive that experience.

Ida.

A relatively young woman, aged thirty. She married in her early twenties, had two children. She writes radio plays and edits a magazine on the same subject. 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.

…

‘Could I speak to Arnold Bush, please?’
He comes to the phone. He sounds reserved. He is with friends who know his wife, who might get suspicious. Is she one of those women who might cause trouble, who can’t control herself?
‘I’m calling to tell you that I love you.’
Sure. That’s great. See you. See you. He doesn’t know that it is the first time she says that word, love. Once she has rung off, it gets worse, intolerable. She decides to throw out his letters, she drinks in order to get so drunk that she can summon up the courage to throw his torn-up letters into a rubbish bin on her way home.

Well, I could quote the whole book, since it goes on like this, the whole 300+ pages. Pain, love, lust, sex, breakup, violence, love, dependency. But it starts lovingly:

When they wake up in the morning, the sun is shining as they open the curtains. They make love in the sunlight on the bed. They make love in the sunlight in the forest, they are always alone. They can smell soil and plants being broken and crushed. It smells of sex, they are friskier outside, this is clearly the smell that brings about procreation. They work, they write. Ida a play for the theatre, for the stage. For Nationaltheatret, she hopes, but she doesn’t say anything, not even to Arnold. She is going to send it to them, she is, she is happy, that is the most important thing.

And increases in intensity:

‘Be rough with me!’ he says.
And: ‘Hurt me!’ ‘Punish me!’ he says, ‘be rough with me!’ _
_No, not that rough!’ he says. ‘Be gentle!’
‘Hit me! Hit me!’ he says. ‘No, not as hard as that. No, ouch!’ he says.
‘I love you,’ she says. ‘Enter me, split me! Let me hear the angels sing!’
‘I’m going to hit you!’ ‘Yes! That feels good. Let me die!’
I’ll tear you to pieces!’

Not only sexually they hurt and love. Even more so emotionally. Ida, after waiting for two years, manages to Arnold after they both divorce. And the relationship becomes increasingly possessive, dependent.

She loves him and wants to be with him, she writes that to him. I love you and I want to be with you. I’m sorry I didn’t ring you the other day and I’m sorry that I came back later than I had said I would. It was mostly because of the children, but possibly also because of you. But I don’t think it is such a big deal and I think it’s unfair for you to draw such extreme conclusions about our relationship based on my transgression. It is also hard for me when you don’t accept my apology. I can’t get a word in. The moment I start a sentence, you just talk over me and milk it grotesquely in a never-ending rant, dismayed, offended, irreconcilable.

And I love the fluent changing point of narrative, as we see above. Anyway, the whole story is Ida-centric, so it’s never unclear who’s who. Her two children are almost not present in the story, only here and there does she interact with them. Same with her soon-to-be ex-husband. Her friends. Her many other lovers. And Arnold, unless they are together.

It ends well: they split up. Both devastated, in a way. But each in one piece. Ida lost her interim lover, in the years she had to wait for Arnold, as he moved on to marry someone else. But all is fine. Or is it?

If only there was a cure, a cure for love. Did he open up an old wound so that the infection could pour out, be released at last, so that the wound could be cleaned, rinsed repeatedly with disinfectant, with stinging fluid, right down to the bloody, open sore, the pus drained, no matter how much it hurt so that love could finally die? Because love dies like books die, they are created and live their lives, short or long, and then they die as all living things must die; doomed to die because without death, there is no life and without death, no love either.

For me, I loved this book.