Youthful heartbreak notwithstanding, I suppose it must be possible to get through life without ever having confronted love or desire as truly capsizing events — as mental, moral or practical ruin. Some of us manage to consign such interludes to the list of a life’s wrong turns: the “bad place” in which you found yourself, the lure of a “narcissist,” the deranging effects of misplaced longing.

One task of literature is to help us grow out of whatever consoling pieties or therapeutic nostrums our cultural moment supplies, and consider instead the larger forces (libidinal, existential, historical) that move through our pitiful affairs and inflated passions. “Madame Bovary,” “Anna Karenina,” Proust’s “Swann in Love” section: One strain of the modern novel is born in the tragicomic perplex of mad love. Which state often has a tight narrative arc, ending in death, wisdom or the desert of mere experience.

In the Norwegian author Vigdis Hjorth’s “If Only,” a more harrowing time scale unfolds.

What if, this novel asks, your amour fou turns into a way of life, a decade-long intractable addiction?

Hjorth’s protagonist, Ida Heier, is a 30-year-old radio playwright in Oslo when she gets involved with Arnold Bush: 10 years older, also a writer, and a celebrated translator of the plays and poems of Bertolt Brecht. Ida and Arnold are both married to other people when they meet at a seminar and first sleep together.

Like most adulterers, they are slaves to logistics; much of the novel’s action consists of hotel bookings, airport assignations, train rides, letters and missed landline calls. (“If Only” was first published in Norway in 2001 and seems to begin in the early 1990s, when secrecy was easier, communication slower.) Roland Barthes once wrote, “The lover’s fatal identity is precisely: I am the one who waits.” Ida waits for Arnold — to become available, get divorced, take her writing seriously, stop sleeping with his students. In the shorter term she waits in Oslo, Trondheim, Copenhagen and Agadir, Morocco, for a series of drunken trysts it seems she cannot refuse.

“If Only” is the fourth of Hjorth’s novels to be translated into English, all by Charlotte Barslund. Her fiction mixes overt political themes — “Long Live the Post Horn!” was about one woman’s campaign to save the Norwegian mail service from privatized competition — with intimate subject matter. “Will and Testament” caused controversy in Norway with its seemingly autofictional treatment of family secrets, including sexual abuse.

The story of Ida and Arnold is not so much about the revelation of secrets as it is about a strangely compulsive and repetitive desire to live openly and covertly at the same time. To the extent of boring her friends and colleagues, Ida will not shut up about her infatuation with the scrawny, balding philanderer. But even after Ida’s divorce and Arnold’s separation from his wife, with domestic and child care arrangements settled and their relationship widely known, the lovers behave as if they are still in the first throes of an illicit and tormenting affair.

In places, “If Only” reminded me of certain autobiographical books by Annie Ernaux, or Catherine Millet’s memoir “The Sexual Life of Catherine M.” That is, pre-#MeToo narratives in which obvious misogyny and abuse — Arnold eventually turns violent — sit uneasily alongside female characters’ erotic pursuit of some fundamentally enlightening void, what Ida calls “the ringing bells of nothingness.”

As in Hjorth’s other novels, turbulent desire is all bound up too with creativity, in Ida’s case with her identity as a writer: assaulted, blurred and enabled by Arnold.

Among this novel’s abiding ambiguities is the fact that we do not know who its narrator is, this knowing entity who says things like “later in their story,” and “they are about to be proved horribly wrong,” as if it were all a comedy about pathetic mortals, viewed from above.