Vigdis Hjorth’s novels are like major fires, destructive and difficult to contain. Set in the early 1990s, If Only, the story of a tempestuous love affair, burns violently from start to finish. Ida Heier is thirty years old and married with two children. An editor and dramatist, she writes in her diary that ‘she is waiting for the heartbreak that will turn her into her true self’. One day she attends a seminar and meets Arnold Bush, a Brecht translator and professor of German who is also married and has a young son. They sleep together and return the next day to their homes, hers in Oslo and his five hundred kilometres to the north in Trondheim. 

‘We’re both married,’ Arnold reminds Ida before they part. ‘This affects people other than us.’ And yet other people barely enter the novel. Returning to her husband and children, Ida is soon consumed with longing and claims she is heading for a divorce. Arnold, despite his constant, compulsive philandering, insists he cannot handle another breakup (he has been married once before). Ida writes and calls and agonises, while Arnold hesitates and avoids making promises, all the while doing just enough to keep her hopes alive. It’s a pattern that repeats itself for several years. Whenever Ida hears about Arnold and another woman, she always has an explanation ready: ‘Consciously or subconsciously, he’s doing this to come to me.’

A love affair of this kind will seem unhealthy or unreasonable to many readers. As the third-person narrator – an obtrusive presence – puts it, ‘It makes no sense to anyone but the lovers.’ Yet Hjorth is an incisive portraitist of passion and fantasy. When Ida learns she will be