On Vigdis Hjorth’s “If Only”

Love drives you crazy. What’s falling in love but losing yourself to someone else, crashing your world headlong into theirs, destroying them both and creating something new? This pell-mell collision, the madness of love, which never ceases to shift, surprise, and constantly reassert itself in the lives of the people involved, is rendered in full in Vigdis Hjorth’s novel If Only, recently translated into English by Charlotte Barslund. It is a book that’s impossible to put down, with each episode, each chapter of its central romance dragging its reader deeper into this same, wild madness of its protagonists.