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A relatively young woman, aged thirty. She married in her early twenties, had two children. It is winter. January and minus 14 degreesC, 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.Can passion be mistaken for love? When Ida meets Arnold, also married, at a conference, she impulsively invites him to share her bed. She returns home, already half-obsessed, and the dissolution of her marriage and break-up of her family pass almost without her noticing. Arnold has a more relaxed attitude toward the affair. But neither his coolness nor the alarming talk she hears about him can dampen her desire. When she finally has Arnold for herself, all the surface niceties and indulgences they enjoy - travel, sex, beers for breakfast and cocktails for dinner - can't sustain the sweetness of the fantasy. Their mounting jealousies and insecurities metastasize, resulting in violence and addiction.In urgent prose, with layers of candid and vivid detail, Hjorth shows just how devastating love can be when it binds the wrong people.
About the author
Vigdis Hjorth is the author of over a dozen prize-winning and best-selling novels. Will and Testament sold 170,000 copies in Norway and has received several awards, including the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature and the Norwegian Booksellers' Prize, as well as being nominated for the National Book Award and Nordic Council Literature Prize. Long Live the Post Horn! won the Believer Book Award for fiction in 2020, and Is Mother Dead was listed for the International Booker Prize in 2023.
Report
The novel offers neither redemption nor transcendence as its resolution. And yet Hjorth makes this relationship and its aftermath legible to us as a part of the human experience-one that we can't extract from the type of love we do consider desirable or healthy. At the end of the book, we might find ourselves wondering, as Ida does: 'If only there was a cure, a cure for love.' And we might realize, even as we wish this, that we don't actually mean it at all. Sophie Haigney The Paris Review
