Toxic Relationships Speak The Same Language

THE LOG: What the intersection of Jenny Erpenbeck's KAIROS and Vigdis Hjorth's IF ONLY show us about grooming.

Today’s newsletter reviews two novels where the characters experience abusive relationships. However you’re feeling today, please give yourself the space to skip if you need it.

My therapist asked me why I read dark, heavy books. I had confessed I read two books back-to-back about toxic affairs. Why do I stick with a book that requires emotional white-knuckling to reach the last page?

There is a part of me that thinks if a read is difficult, it is hard-earned. There is more to learn through suffering, either in the protagonist’s experience or the experience of reading the protagonist’s experience. It warrants a gold badge of honor more than, say, Love Is Blind.

(Though I love Love Is Blind.)

But ultimately, the answer is these felt like books I “should” read as exemplary literary fiction. Both novelists have won the Booker Prize, including Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos. Vigdis Hjorth’s titles have floated through bookstores and Substack book round-ups I trust, so I was familiar with her name and not her work when I picked up the red cover for If Only.

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Note for my grandpa: the Booker Prize is awarded to the best work of fiction published in the U.K. or Ireland. This includes translations, so the awards feature a lot of European countries and authors. I love the books that this award has highlighted—Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Murray’s The Bee Sting—to discover surprising storylines and prose choices.

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Hjorth’s If Only was originally published in Norway in 2001 and translated to English this year. The inside flap described the novel’s relationship as passionate and dangerous.

I thought it might provide the schadenfreude of watching incompatibility.

(Ironically, the same expectation I have when I watch Love Is Blind.)

Instead, these books were heavy. It took me all of October to get through the slow erosion of the relationships crafted in these novels. They’re not easy before-bed reads. But the erosion of the identities of the young women in affairs with older, married men is precise, exacting, and unforgiving.

Stay with me here! Because by the end of the month, having finished both and ruminated on them in the wake of Trump’s re-election, my mind glued these characters to the walls of my brain. Their interiority became my own.

In IF ONLY, the lost still have a strong compass.

Our introduction to Ida, our protagonist, is shadowy, layered in the past and future perspectives. The book opens with a first person reflection of the narrator viewing herself at twenty years old. Her younger self is lost at a train station. The narrator wants to raise her hand, to ease the pain of losing direction.

Thirty-year-old Ida, a professional playwright for radio broadcast with a husband and two small children, finds her life boring. She claims she’s bound for a divorce, though her husband brings her coffee in bed, gives her space to write, willingly volunteers to take care of the kids. At a conference, Ida meets Arnold Bush, a translator. She is more attracted to the idea of an affair than she is in Arnold. After their affair in her hotel room, she asks if he’s gay. (Burn.) Their relationship begins with her humbling him. In a coded public retaliation, Arnold makes a crude joke at their conference the next day:

“‘I have,’ he drawls, ‘during this seminar had confirmed something I have long suspected. That Norwegian dramatists are better off than we—and they themselves —think. In contrast to my university colleagues and I who view writing as a challenge, who struggle to write, the dramatists enjoy writing, they say. And not only that. I've also just learned that it brings them to orgasm.’

She couldn't get over it. An orgasm. While she was in the room. Something he hadn't managed last night. He wanted to get a laugh. And the audience laughs. Leaning slightly forwards in a clean, pale-yellow shirt, he shows his true colours. Even this early on it is clear what kind of man he is.”

Despite this winning recommendation of bad sex, Ida pursues him. By pursue, I should say “stalk.” She hounds him and considers his inconsistency as proof of their elevated love. His fear signals that their love may destroy their lives, and she wants that.

There are brushstrokes of concern from her doting husband and family that suggest previous episodes of mania reignited by the affair. We never learn what happened to her, what pain her twenty-year-old self carries to that train station before she marries her husband and has her children. We don’t need to know. What we can see is nothing stops Ida as she uses Arnold to fill a void in herself. She divorces her husband who brings her coffee in bed and takes care of their kids. She seduces anyone who might have crossed paths with Arnold Bush to glean more information about her imagined soulmate. When she spots a conference in May in his town, she prays nothing will happen, he won’t die, she will make it, or her life will fall apart. She thinks,

“No, please don’t take away the only thing that matters, without this pounding in my heart, this all-consuming longing, I am nothing, I will be numb, life is meaningless…”

At this conference, Arnold finally agrees to meet Ida at his university office hours. She visits him and thinks,

“Did she think they would kiss, fuck on his office couch, that she would pounce on him, it is not until now that she knows him, that the thought crosses her mind. She asks if they can go out.”

As Arnold begins an extramarital relationship with Ida, they take vacations to other countries. They pose as newlyweds and accept complimentary champagne. They drink a lot. They retreat from their families and exes and create a codependent relationship. Now that Ida has Arnold in a relationship, he manipulates her. He drinks too much, weeps often, and requires her comfort. Years into their relationship, he reads a draft of a play she wrote, and he is surprised. He never knew her, but she has always known him.

The truth is she knew him from his first crude joke at the conference, his attempt to grow his masculine ego at her expense. After they have been together for seven years, she thinks,

“She sees him, he is small and insecure. But she can’t tell him that she sees him, how small, how insecure he is and that she loves him regardless, because he doesn’t want her to see it.”