Clarity and Delusion

We have all listened to someone—a friend, an acquaintance, ourselves—go on and on and on about being in a terrible romantic relationship. These stories are fundamentally predictable, and they cause predictable reactions: horrified amusement, fascination, pity, boredom.

If Only, by the Norwegian writer Vigdis Hjorth, is a book-length account of a disastrous, drawn-out love affair. Frustration is part of the experience of reading it. I kept muttering to myself about the protagonist, Why is she putting up with this? And also, Why am I putting up with this? And yet I was not tempted to lay the book down, because Hjorth is such a daring, original, sneaky writer. She sets her books like traps, their existential questions camouflaged under a layer of shaggy, rambling prose. She has a gift for depicting painful, confusing, and mortifying relationships, putting them under a microscope, showing us more and more.

Hjorth’s writing is also often darkly funny in the ironic distance it opens up between the narrators’ points of view, what they tell us is happening, and their outward behavior, what the author allows us to see actually happening. In If Only, Hjorth knowingly plays with how banal and repetitive romantic obsession can seem—how blind, wasteful, and pathetic—to all those who aren’t experiencing it and even, at some point, to the lover herself.

Hjorth, who is sixty-six, has written at least nineteen novels, five of which have been translated into English, and they are often associated with Scandinavian autofiction.^* Her protagonists are women much like herself: artists and intellectuals whose lifestyle is supported by a state with generous public funding for culture. They spend their time writing, debating, drinking, traveling, taking long walks in the forest with their dogs, and groping their way toward personal truths. Despite their intelligence and good intentions, they are often blind to their own motivations or to the real nature of their relationships. As a result they may be honest, but they are not quite trustworthy. They engage in behavior that is troubling, compulsive, self-destructive. They spiral out of control, for reasons that make perfect sense to them and seem more or less valid to everyone else. Such is Hjorth’s talent as a storyteller, though, that however one may feel about her characters, one is deeply caught up in their lives.

If Only begins with Ida, a burgeoning playwright and mother in her early thirties, meeting and sleeping with Arnold Bush, an older married professor, at a conference. Arnold is an established scholar, a translator of Brecht, and a theater critic. The next day at the conference,

he gets up and stands with his lips pressed together. He waits until there is silence, until everyone is looking at him, he waits too long before he speaks and his voice is too soft so everyone has to strain to hear what he is saying, it is as if he can’t be bothered to raise his voice, as if it is not worth it, as if he is bored by the whole thing.

But he is not bored; he likes attention, and he gets it by choosing his moment, making a joke. Perhaps this is what the narrator means when she says, “Even this early on it is clear what kind of man he is.” The cryptic remark is one of several made by a narrator who hovers just outside the frame, far in the future, looking on her younger self with knowing pity.

Arnold is skinny, balding, and has a “heavy reptile gaze.” He sends Ida coy, flattering, intellectual letters; he suggests their first meeting, but after that “she has to ask, suggest, plead, take responsibility. He makes sure never to promise, never to ask, never to plan”; he warns her that he won’t leave his wife.

Ida blows past these shortcomings and other clear signs that Arnold is deceitful and aridly selfish. Her infatuation with him blooms—unexpectedly, inexplicably—in the opening pages of the book. Ida is grieving the impending end of her own marriage (she has fallen out of love with her kind husband), and she throws herself into her love for Arnold with an unsettling abandon, spending the summer after she meets him in a haze of romantic exaltation:

Where were her children? Did she feed them? Take them to nursery school? Did she attend parents’ evenings? She doesn’t remember, she remembers only one name. She carried children or pushed buggies with children around while she thought of one name. In the forest, by the lakes, bare-legged on the dusty road, she thought of only one name.

It is the great bitter joke of the book that such deep passion and eloquence are inspired by a man who is so evidently mediocre. Ida’s obsession with him tips back and forth between hysterical jealousy and hopeful exaltation. For several years she waits for Arnold to realize that they should be together. She thinks and talks of him constantly to worried friends and bemused acquaintances. If Only is an anti–love story, a reverse romance: instead of hoping and waiting for the lovers to get together, you dread their being finally united. Once they are—Arnold’s marriage eventually collapses as well—you spend two hundred pages yearning for the sweet release of a breakup that you know must come.

It doesn’t even take Ida that long to see Arnold clearly. “He isn’t someone who loves, who chooses, he is chosen, to be loved is more important to him than to love,” she says. When she gently chides him because “he never asks her a single question which doesn’t involve him,” he bursts into hysterical tears of self-recrimination and self-pity.

Ida and Arnold are alcoholics, workaholics, hedonists, intellectuals—people determined to live what they consider to be interesting lives. During their best times together, they bask in their unconventionality, their freedom, their intellectual communion, the way they can forgive each other anything and finish each other’s sentences and thoughts. At one point they even write what sounds like a truly terrible play together. But their relationship is also a series of tiresome, alcohol-soaked scenes:

Howling, screaming, breaking things, fighting, hiccupping sobs and passionate lovemaking. Drunkenness and arguments, then confession and someone’s childhood wounds. All dregs whisked to the surface, shame meets shame and makes love more passionate. Still in a state the next morning and out into the too-bright light of the world, late, wearing sunglasses in all kinds of weather to the dingiest of bars, dives, the darkest corners, drinking beer until their hands stop shaking. Until they laugh at themselves as if what happened was funny: We’re crazy! There’s no one like us, no one understands.

Arnold is unfaithful, jealous, insecure, manipulative. He threatens to kill himself if Ida leaves him. He punishes her with the silent treatment if she doesn’t pay enough attention to him; he doesn’t even like her to answer the phone when he’s at her house. One night he yells at her and slams her against the wall; her children intervene, and it becomes clear that it is not the first time he has been violent and “her children have shoved him outside and locked the door and told him that they won’t let him back in.”

It was when this scene took place that I realized how long the relationship had already lasted; Ida’s children had grown up. And still it wasn’t over; she wasn’t ready for it to be over. At one point I thought, The genre that If Only truly belongs to is the prison memoir. I knew Ida would free herself at some point; I knew she would survive. She knows it herself:

It’s not going to get better. And she can’t live like this, she can’t grow old like this. It will end at some point and that will be a relief. She can’t suffer like this for ever, she can’t fear this pain for ever. As long as she knows that, as long as she can be sure that she will leave him eventually, then their relationship can carry on, as long as she knows there is a way out, an end to it.

If Only captures the double vision of the bad relationship, the things one knows and chooses not to know, the ups and downs, the moments of weakness and strength, of clarity and delusion. It also captures a truly staggering waste of time, devotion, and sensitivity. By the end Ida and Arnold are wrung out:

They are quieter than usual and slow, they don’t even argue until their last day, they can’t even manage that. Arnold accuses her of showing too much cleavage, so at least they manage one argument before they leave. What is she trying to achieve with her deep cleavage. They sit in the bar on the ferry home and they get drunk as usual. If anyone is watching them, can be bothered to watch them and can be bothered to think about them, they will be thinking that there is a couple of tired old drunks arguing about crap. And then: We never want to turn into them.

The narrator writes in one of her rare interjections, “It is all so long ago now. Since then she has learned the brutal truth. Their tragedy wasn’t that they didn’t get to be together, it was that they did.” And yet the narrator, even at the end, with full hindsight, has little to say about why Ida was drawn to this man and why she endured him for so long. The book’s unsettling effect stems precisely from the absence of any analysis, justification, or expression of conventional regret. Since Ida throws herself so fully into the relationship, it’s not a classic tale of emotional or romantic abuse. And the book’s ending provides no sense of revelation or redemption. Arnold, when Ida finally walks away from him, goes on as he has been, self-absorbed and aggrieved, berating her: “You never put me first.” Ida has known all along what he is like. What one has to face, at the end of the book, is what Ida has had to face: that their love was arbitrary, awful, and inevitable. The damage it caused—the time lost, the other chances missed, the children hurt—was irrevocable. It had no greater meaning, taught no lesson.

There is one set of clues to Ida and Arnold’s relationship, gently scattered in the beginning of the story. More than once there is a mention of Ida’s damage, her childhood trauma. She has always felt that she is broken, that there is a “missing piece” in her life story. Hjorth’s subsequent novel, Will and Testament, is an account of what happens when a person finds that missing piece and won’t let go of it. It is her best-known book, the first one I read and still my favorite, so thoroughly did it surprise, disarm, and affect me.

The story starts off as a fairly mundane family intrigue. The narrator, Bergljot, is a middle-aged woman, another theater writer, who has been estranged from her family for some time. She learns from her sister Astrid, with whom she is in occasional contact, that there has been an argument over their parents’ will. They had said they would split their estate evenly among their four children, but they have signed over two beloved holiday cabins to their two younger daughters, Astrid and Åsa. Bergljot’s brother, Bård, who is still wounded by their father’s cold and violent treatment of him as a child, is incensed by the decision.

Then the father dies in a sudden accident, and the mother and the four grown children must meet for the funeral and to discuss the inheritance. The two unhappy, recriminating older siblings square off against the two defensive, loyal younger ones. It is clear almost from the start that the tension in the family is not just over cabins. The parents have tried both to placate their older children and to show favor to their younger ones, and they have failed. Bergljot is now insisting on a larger reckoning. How much is on the ledger will only become gradually clear, as this slow burn of a book winds its way toward an explosive confrontation.

At first glance Hjorth’s style is strikingly casual. (All the vivid English translations of Hjorth’s novels are by Charlotte Barslund.) A typical sentence is a string of declarative statements, loosely tethered together by commas. Here is Bergljot’s account of going to meet her brother at a hotel:

On my way there I suddenly remembered that Mum always used to meet her friends at the Grand in the old days when they went out shopping and were ladies who lunched. I myself had been out shopping with Mum a couple of times, was it the memory of Mum that had made me pick the Grand? I hoped my childhood wasn’t coming back, I hoped I wasn’t going back to my childhood, and that that explained why I was shaking. I opened the door, there was a queue to get into the restaurant, the pre-Christmas rush, and many smartly dressed older people, I shouldn’t have picked the Grand. I might bump into Mum and her friends, surely there was a woman who looked like Mum, like I remembered her, in the corner, I turned away, I wanted to leave, then I saw someone who looked like him, like I remembered him, his back and the back of his head, Bård, I said, and he turned around and it was him, twenty years older.

At first it is hard to parse what is going on from the narrator’s jittery, overwrought voice. She describes how “in order not to sink or drown I had to keep my distance” from family members who acted “as though we didn’t see the world differently, in mutually exclusive terms, as though they weren’t denying the very fabric from which I was made.” For years her mother and her sister have scolded and cajoled her for the distance she has maintained. For years she has lived in fear of seeing her parents, responding to the pressure to resume relations with sudden vicious outbursts, rants on answering machines, and late-night angry emails that she guiltily asks Astrid to ignore in the morning. (Astrid strangely claims to delete the messages without reading them.) “But”—Bergljot asks herself—“surely you can’t forgive what people refuse to admit? Did I think they were capable of owning up to it?” Describing an earlier time in her life, she says:

What I was experiencing, I came to realise once I started to understand my life, was that a moment of insight was approaching like the tremors that precede an earthquake, and like an animal I could sense it before it happened. I was filled with dread and I trembled at the painful dawning of a truth which would rip me to pieces, perhaps I was working subconsciously to advance it, to get it over with, given that it was inevitable.

The sense of a terrible impending truth also sweeps through the pages of Will and Testament. The book is a study of denial and the messy struggle to tear through it. To read it is to experience the emergence of the buried memory, the repressed secret, the unspoken and unspeakable fact.

As Hjorth cuts backward and forward in time, Bergljot shares memories from her childhood and youth. She recounts divorcing her husband, becoming a theater critic, making the friends who would become her alternative family. One day she begins to experience a debilitating pain. She realizes that it is caused by her own writing, in which she finds the line “He touched me like a doctor, he touched me like a father.” The realization that she was abused as a child floods her consciousness. Here, finally, is the missing piece. She begins therapy and confronts her family, who refuse to believe her. After a while they refuse to even acknowledge that she ever said anything about it; they act as if it never happened. This, unsurprisingly, drives her nearly mad.

A polite message from her sister Astrid, trying once again to smother the truth with euphemisms (“Everyone makes mistakes”), pushes Bergljot over the edge. At the reading of her father’s will, in a scene that is both dramatic and a touch comic, she takes advantage of the presence of a stunned accountant and her supportive older brother to read her accusations into the family record: her father sexually assaulted her when she was between the ages of five and seven. Bergljot’s younger sisters react with dismay (“Now is not the time or the place”), and her mother rounds on her with the fury of a cornered animal:

Why didn’t you just go to the police, Mum screamed, and before you told me it was just the once, and now you’re saying it happened over and over.

But it was you who asked me if Dad had ever done something to me when I was little, I said.

And you said no! Mum said.

Then why did you ask me in the first place, I demanded to know, and why didn’t you ask my sisters the same question.

This is not on, Åsa stopped us. It’s all wrong, Åsa said.

Why would she say it if it wasn’t true, Bård said.

To get attention, Mum said, she sits in cafés all over town, drunk, talking about her secret, it’s dreadful, shame on you!

Hjorth was already a well-known writer when Will and Testament was published. Many details from her biography and family background match those of Bergljot’s. When the Norwegian press uncovered the degree to which the book was based on actual events and communications, a public debate erupted over the limits of autofiction and the ethics of seeming to make such grave allegations through a work of fiction.

Hjorth’s family’s reaction encouraged this reading of her book. Her mother threatened to sue a theater staging a play based on it. Her sister—a human rights lawyer, like Bergljot’s sister Astrid—wrote her own novelistic rebuttal, Free Will, which covers the same incidents from a different perspective. In it the narrator, Nina, is shocked by the actions of her self-centered sister Vera, who portrays their family in a book containing false allegations of abuse. Free Will is dedicated “To Mum and Dad.”

Hjorth has always maintained that her book is a novel, and that strikes me as true. However autobiographical it may be, however much of a “fuck you” to her family, Will and Testament is literature. It is crafted with too much careful intent to be anything else.

The novel dramatizes the predicament of having a story that other people refuse to believe, that is irreconcilable with, indeed fatally dangerous to, the family narrative. But it does so in a way that is not just meant to bluntly persuade. It leaves a shadow of doubt about its central allegation—the narrator knows that it happened, but the author lets readers wonder for a long time. Might Bergljot, who drinks too much and seems emotionally unstable, have conjured up a false memory in therapy, as her sisters believe? Might she be, as her mother claims, a selfish, irresponsible attention seeker? Is it fair for her to expect everyone to believe her when there is so little evidence for her claims? The way Hjorth constructs and layers her story so that lacunae and questions remain mirrors the difficulty, in such situations, of achieving narrative clarity or full certainty. (When I reread the book, I found that a scene I distinctly remembered was actually a figment of my imagination, whereas I had forgotten some of the most direct, clear accusations, as if I had repressed the ugly truth myself.)

Bergljot too has quite a few doubts and hesitations; she wonders what she can accomplish by confronting her family again; she wonders if she would be better off moving on from the past. (“Am I caressing my scar?”) She sympathizes with her sisters: Åsa, who resents her because Bergljot has always been the center of their parents’ attention, and Astrid, who genuinely seems to believe that there is a way for her not to take sides. Bergljot even puts herself in the place of their parents, whom she repeatedly calls “poor Mum” and “poor Dad” and who she imagines lived in terror of her remembering her abuse and speaking out about it, bringing their entire world and self-image crashing down. Bergljot says:

Dad’s crime was greater but purer, Dad’s self-inflicted punishment was harsher, his reticence, his depression more penitent than Mum’s fake blindness, Mum who pretended that nothing had happened, who made demands and apportioned blame.

The book’s central confrontation takes place with the mother, who has been the father’s victim as well as accomplice—the daughter’s last hope, the daughter’s worst enemy.

Hjorth explores the relationship between a mother and a daughter in her next book, which in many respects seems like a continuation of the same story. In Will and Testament, it is the daughter who wants to keep her distance; in Is Mother Dead, it is the mother who refuses contact.

Once again a middle-aged female narrator is estranged from her family because of her life choices and her artistic career. Many years earlier Johanna left her husband and the law studies her lawyer father had pushed her into, moved abroad with her painting instructor, and became a painter herself. This decision scandalized her joyless, conformist, hypocritical bourgeois family. Since then her decision not to attend her father’s funeral and, more importantly, an exhibition in Oslo of her paintings have ended all contact. Her family saw her triptych Child and Mother 1 (“where the mother stands in a corner wrapped up in herself with dark, introverted eyes and the child is curled up in the other corner, and those who want to can see that the shadow falling over both of them looks like a man in a lawyer’s gown”) not as art but as an insulting aspersion against them, “a vendetta.”

Johanna’s thoughts on her family’s reaction to her art are a chance for Hjorth to continue the argument provoked by Will and Testament. Johanna’s sister, Ruth, accuses her of ingratitude, of caricaturing her family

in deeply offensive ways in order to make yourself interesting, dress yourself up in your bad childhood because that’s what an “artist” is supposed to do…. You have stolen Mum’s life and presented to the world an account of Mum for which there is no foundation, but how are people supposed to know that, how you twist everything to make it fit your narrative without ever once considering that other people’s narratives are equally valuable.

“Are they so myopic and self-obsessed that they only see themselves” in her art, Johanna thinks, “and at the same time also believe that they have been portrayed incorrectly; it is us, but we’re not like that!” She tells herself that

the relationship of a work of art to reality is uninteresting, the work’s relationship to the truth is crucial; the true value of the work doesn’t lie in its relationship to a so-called reality, but in its effect on the observer.

And yet Johanna hasn’t quite come to terms with the consequences of her art’s relationship to reality and truth. When the book opens, she is back in Oslo after thirty years. She is widowed, like her mother, and living just a few miles away from her. Soon she becomes fixated on the idea of getting back in touch with her mother, for whom she has many questions:

How have you experienced it all? How was it for you? And how do you see the situation now, the existential one which we share, what do you think about our situation? Will I never know? Will she ever know what it has been like, what it is like for me? She must wonder about it, surely? About what I think, about how I am, no matter how angry, how resentful she is, she must wonder about it because in spite of everything I am her nearly sixty-year-old child.

Johanna cannot accept that her mother truly does not want to see her, that her mother does not have any love for her. What child, of any age, can accept a mother’s complete rejection?

But Johanna also cannot believe that her mother, whom she remembers as brittle and unhappy, trapped in her marriage to a frightening, domineering man, never wanted to escape, never understood or secretly sympathized with Johanna’s own escape. She has vivid memories of her mother as she once was: young and beautiful, frightened and frightening, powerless and powerful, loving and dangerous. She is convinced that she understands her mother’s suffering now, that she can see the truth of her mother’s story: “I told myself she had remained a stranger to herself all her life and that she harboured a wish to be set free.”

This is a book about stalking your mother. Like most stalkers, Johanna insists that her victim actually wants and needs her presence. Johanna is an intelligent, observant, sensitive person who, acting under an irresistible compulsion, behaves in increasingly unhinged ways. As far as she is concerned, she is on a mission to reveal an essential truth about her mother. But she is also a woman who packs a thermos and crouches in the bushes outside her mother’s house, goes through her mother’s trash, “accidentally” breaks her mother’s window. And things escalate further.

For most of Is Mother Dead, we are pulled along by the intensity and persuasiveness of Johanna’s point of view. But we are suddenly brought up short when we see her finally confront her mother—not the one she has imagined all along but the actual one: a vulnerable, elderly, terrified, furious woman who tells her daughter, “You’re not who you think you are.” There may be truth to Johanna’s childhood memories of her mother, to her view of her mother’s life. But it is not a truth she can impose. It is a fundamental misapprehension, an act of arrogance (the arrogance of an artist who believes in her vision?), to think that she can.

In Is Mother Dead, just as in Hjorth’s other books, there are things that cannot be fixed. There is pain that cannot be written or talked away, cannot be lessened by honesty or reflection. But there are also pleasures and consolations: the joys of work, of forgiving children (who reassure their damaged, guilty mothers), of steadfast friends. As Bergljot’s friend Klara, who first appears as a liability and turns out to be a generous ally, tells her, “Endurance is the first duty of all living beings.”

And there is the natural world, which is beautifully observed in its changes and extremes. Johanna has a cabin in the forest. In between her bouts of surveilling her mother and reminiscing about her childhood, she retreats there. The bond she forms with her surroundings ends up offering her solace, a sense of home. It seems like compensation of sorts for the lost connection to her mother:

The uniform, undulating darkness of the big spruce forest lay behind me like a warm wall and in front of me like a promise, as tranquil as if it was fast asleep and I thought I could feel how the sap rose slowly in the trees and in everything else that grew, heather and brushwood and a belated bluebell in between the blades of grass, they were preparing for the frost. And it felt as if life also stirred, sleepy and silent, inside my body, as if my grief settled in me and fell asleep.