Aged 30, Oslo-based radio dramatist Ida quits her marriage and hurls herself into the pursuit of a, frankly, unprepossessing man baby of a Norwegian Brecht scholar. She sees him across the street and her frenzied lover’s eye transforms this bald academic with a flapping raincoat into some kind of Scandi Adonis – even though readers may struggle not to cry out: “Mate, you can do better.”
But she can’t: love, if that’s what this is, has done for Ida. Hjorth writes: “For years she will feel a pang in her chest whenever she sees a man’s light-coloured trenchcoat.” Given how rainy it is in northern Europe, that’s a lot of pangs. Even though I have never flown to Trondheim to stalk a Brecht scholar at a Goethe conference – at least not yet – I found myself powerfully identifying with the heroine of Vigdis Hjorth’s 2001 novel If Only, belatedly published in English.
In more than a dozen novels now, Hjorth has often portrayed superbly antinomian women who disdain family duties such as looking after children or ageing mothers, while pursing often disastrous romances and being harshly judged by friends and siblings. In such enchanting novels as Will and Testament, Is Mother Dead and Love Live the Post Horn!, she depicts women who, despite their evident insecurities and inadequacies, are thrillingly and cussedly at odds with what is expected from them.
The grip of humiliating passion is hardly a new literary theme. Charles Swann in lifelong thrall to Parisian courtesan Odette de Crecy in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu is the leading example. In Annie Ernaux’s 1991 autofiction Simple Passion, the Nobel laureate coolly meditated on how her life was upended by her romantic obsession with a rather mysterious Russian expat, showing us how everything became a function of her obsession and that anything outside that sucking vortex – friendship, kids, politics, work – became devoid of interest.
Hjorth pushes this theme to its tragicomic limits. Her heroine pursues the folly of her passion into sexual humiliation, betrayal and displays of public drunkenness that make Ida’s colleagues edge gingerly away from her as she rolls on the floor in crapulous stupor.
At one meeting, Arnold Bush tells Ida firmly that he won’t leave his wife and kids, nor will he be loyal to her. Rather, he will continue to have affairs – not just with Ida but with his students if he feels like it. His assertion of his right to infantile libertinage against her delusive hopes for his sexual fidelity, provoke a relatable caps-lock denunciation. “SHAGGER,” she writes. “SLEEPING WITH YOUR STUDENTS, YOU ABSOLUTE SHIT, I NEVER WANT TO SEE YOU AGAIN!” Reading this, I thought, finally, she’s finally got this jerk’s number.
But of course she hasn’t. As soon as she’s dropped the letter into the postbox, she imagines that his wife will find out about him sleeping with his student and divorce him. And then, Ida supposes (insanely), she will be able to move in and become the second Mrs Bush. Right, I felt like writing in the margin, because that’s going to happen. Hjorth’s portrait of her heroine’s madness nearly always teeters towards comedy, which is one reason the book, though depicting suffering and shame, is such a pleasure to read.
• If Only by Vigdis Hjorth (translated by Charlotte Barslund) is published by Verso (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
