Ti amo

by Hanne Ørstavik, Karen Fastrup (Translator)

"Jeg elsker deg. Vi sier det til hverandre hele tiden. Vi sier det, i stedet for å si noe annet. Hva skulle det andre ha vært? Du: Jeg holder på å dø. Vi: Ikke gå fra meg. Jeg: Jeg vet ikke hva jeg skal gjøre. Før: Jeg vet ikke hva jeg skal gjøre uten deg. Når du ikke er her mer. Nå: Jeg vet ikke hva jeg skal gjøre med disse dagene, denne tiden, hvor døden er det mest synlige i alle ting. Jeg elsker deg. Du sier det om natten når du våkner av smertene eller mellom to drømmer og strekker armen ut etter meg. Jeg sier det til deg når jeg finner skallen din som er blitt liten og rund i hånda mi nå som håret ditt nesten er borte, når jeg stryker deg litt for å forsøke å få deg til å snu deg så du slutter å snorke. Jeg elsker deg."

Høsten 2018 får mannen hennes en alvorlig kreftdiagnose. Det er ikke lenge siden hun flyttet til Italia for å leve sammen med ham der. De har giftet seg, de elsker hverandre, de er så nære. Hun vet at han skal dø, legene har sagt det til henne, men vet han det egentlig selv? Døden er der hele tiden mellom dem, men er blitt noe de ikke kan snakke om. "Ti amo" er en roman skrevet tett på virkeligheten. Det er en opprivende, skakende og øm roman, en roman om sorg, om ensomheten døden skaper, men også om dyp kjærlighet og om å åpne seg og ta livet til seg.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Romance, Novels, Grief, Death, Short Stories

92 pages, Hardcover

First published October 2, 2020

About the author

Hanne Ørstavik (born 28 November 1969) is a Norwegian writer. She was born in Tana in Finnmark province in the far north of Norway, and moved to Oslo at the age of 16. Her parents are Wenche Ørstavik and Gunnar Ørstavik. She has two brothers, Paul Ørstavik and Sakse Ørstavik.She has one daughter, Mari Ørstavik. She has two nieces, Maisie and Helena, and two nephews, Murphy and Thomas. With the publication of the novel Hakk (Cut) in 1994, Ørstavik embarked on a career that would make her one of the most remarkable and admired authors in Norwegian contemporary literature. Her literary breakthrough came three years later with the publication of Kjærlighet (Love<?i>), which in 2006 was voted the 6th best Norwegian book of the last 25 years in a prestigious contest in Dagbladet. Since then she has written several acclaimed and much discussed novels and received a host of literary prizes.

In 2002, she was awarded the Dobloug Prize for her literary works, and in 2004, the Brage Prize for the novel Presten.

Ørstavik’s books have been translated into 15 languages.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Adina · Rating 4 out of 5]

This a heartbreaking and beautifully written novella. I got the audiobook through Spiracle due to its longlisting to the Warwick Women Prize for Fiction. Unfortunately, I did not read the blurb before starting the novel and I cannot finish it. I do not read books with cancer as the main subject. The subject makes me very anxious and I just can't get through them. I tried to listen to Ti Amo because it was beautiful but I had a constant sense of dread while reading and I stopped after 1 hour or so. I really recommend trying it, if you can read books about the big C.

[♑︎♑︎♑︎ ♑︎♑︎♑︎ · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very tough book to read. A variety of perfect. The author doesn't permit her protagonist any respite or excuse or looking-away or redemptive moments in this short novel about a woman losing her husband to cancer. What was most heartbreaking, and what felt most true to me, is the way the narrator's attention wanders. She can't feel the grief the way she wants to, all the time. There is never any greater truth-telling or shared understanding between her and her husband, that he is, in fact, dying. That's what makes the book so wrenchingly sad to me. It's about the time in a relationship when telling someone you love them isn't enough. It's about when you are still so apart as unique individuals--no matter how perfect your love is for one another, or would be, if you were both healthy--that you can't face the death to come, or talk about it openly. It's about not having the time to learn to love one another better than you already do. So you keep secrets. You pretend. You do your best.

I like to think that if I have the (what is the right word, "opportunity?"--all right, I'll try that) ...I like to think that, if I have the opportunity to have a long slow death, where I know what's coming in the end for me, then I will participate in that process openly, rather than pretend it isn't happening...that there might be something to be learned, on that part of the journey...but I know it isn't that way for most of us, especially if we're in pain, or medicated against the pain to the point where we aren't really participating in life the same way any longer.

So here is a book that is putting that truth front and center: that we not only are going to die, but that dying itself, for most of us, is a lonely process, where we may not be in any condition to be present with our loved ones, or to savor our last moments in the way we might imagine for ourselves before we get there. What a cheerful little review I've written. Anyway, read it. It's a small miracle of a book that gave me very big feelings.

[Antoinette · Rating 5 out of 5]

“ I love you. We say it to each other all the time. We say it instead of saying something else. What would that something else be? You: I’m dying. Us: Don’t leave me. Me: I don’t know what to do. Before: I don’t know what I’ll do without you. When you’re not here anymore. Now: I don’t know what to do with these days, all this time, in which death is the most obvious of all things. I love you.”

So begins this tragic story- Tragic because we, of course, know how it will end. But it is also a story of a deep love between a man and a woman, who remain unnamed throughout. What is even more impactful is knowing that this is the author’s real life story.

I’m pretty sure all of us have lost someone close to us. What is the one word that is rarely spoken between the dying and the living-Death- “I am dying”, “You are dying”. In this novella, the wife wants to be able to speak those words to her husband, but holds back. It acts as a barrier between them.

“Are you not talking about it for my sake? It leaves us each alone with it.” ( she is thinking this thought)

Having been a nurse for 46 years and having been with many who are dying- people who are dying usually know they are dying, but they don’t want to speak the words and make it real. Saying the words means you have given up hope, so why speak them.

This book is sad and profound but yet what I will take away is their bond and love and how they were there for each other and never stopped saying “Ti Amo.”

I highly recommend this author!

This book was translated by: Martin Aitken- it read beautifully!

Published: 2020

[Lady Clementina ffinch-ffarowmore · Rating 5 out of 5]

My thanks to Archipelago/Steerforth Press for a review copy of this book via Edelweiss.

Ti Amo (2022) is a raw, honest, beautiful, heart-breaking, autobiographical account of a woman whose husband is suffering terminal cancer. Written originally in Norwegian by author Hanne Ørstavik, the version I read is translated brilliantly by Martin Aitken.

In Ti Amo, our unnamed narrator is a Norwegian novelist, living in Milan with her husband, the publisher of the Italian version of her books, whom she met and fell in love with on a trip there some years earlier. Now, in just their fourth year together, he is dying, with pancreatic cancer, undergoing chemo and treatments, but only so as to make him comfortable. The narrator and her husband attempt to live some semblance of a ‘normal’ life, him still attending office when he can; her going on her travels to attend bookfairs now and then; yet their life is defined by the regular hospital visits, the constant, often excruciating pain which her husband must bear, and which most times she can do nothing about since access to morphine is difficult, as well as her own struggles trying to write for that is the only way she can cope—in this case, not writing one of her usual novels (which she is unable to do under the circumstances), but this account, of what she is going through. At one point she writes:

The novel is the life I live on the inside and it fetches things up from different times and separate layers that I often don’t realise need to meet … the novel possesses an insight so much deeper than my own, and because it’s in touch with this very life force itself, it knows so much better than I do where the wave of each new novel is going to take me.

Written in a sense as a letter to her husband, the account moves back and forth between past and present, her first meeting with him and falling in love, the initial bouts of illness that didn’t seem to have a cause, the realisation of what it really was, and then the present where she must live every minute knowing that he is slipping away; the feeling sometimes overwhelming her, at others leaving her simply numb.

And for a long time just looking at you was painful to me, I couldn’t look at you without the knowledge that you’re going to die, your eyes, everything about you said death to me. And even though it’s not that acute anymore, it still won’t pass, now it’s quieter in a way, normal almost, death has become an attendant presence, everything’s just the way it is, I’m here with you and soon you won’t be there anymore.

While there is much and deep love between the two, there is much also left unsaid, particularly the truth that must be faced that he is dying; she wishes to talk about it, and it seems that he doesn’t leaving her she unsure what he is really feeling or going through.

Ørstavik’s account is deeply felt and harrowing, and Aitken’s wonderful translation gets the reader to experience every emotion and thought with her. The pain, struggle, the knowledge that someone you love won’t be with you any longer, but having still to live some version of normalcy; amid all this her real self too gets somewhat lost, absorbed by it all. This isn’t a long read (just little over a hundred pages in the version I have/below 100 in others), but it is a hard and emotional one—I look 3 days to read it.

A poignant and beautiful book, but one I’d recommend reading when one’s in the mind for it.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s not new any more. Now it's just the way it is. You're dying. You lie in the bedroom, typing your novel into your phone, halfway through it now, you say, a sci-fi crime novel, as you've explained, and you're so completely wrapped up in it that when we have breakfast together on the sofa, or if I just stand close to you for a bit, or sit down on the edge of the bed, and you look up at me and I ask you where you've gone, what you're thinking about, you jab a finger towards your head or the phone, and it means the same thing, that you're away inside your novel.

I too am writing this, the words I’m typing now, at this moment, in the study facing the rear courtyard, from whose window I can see rooftops and the dome of San Lorenzo, and far away in the distance the snow-covered peaks this side of Switzerland. It’s Sunday 5th January 2020, 3.17pm now, and I’m writing this and you’re still here, alive.

Ti amo is Martin Aitken's translation of Hanne Ørstavik 2020 novella of the same title, and is published by And Other Stories in the UK, and Archipelago Books in the US.

This is the latest book from the highly-recommended Republic of Consciousness Book of the Month subscription service - sign up here.

This is a short (87 pages) but powerful work, a difficult read in the sense of the powerful emotions that underpin it.

In June 2020, Hanne Ørstavik's husband, Luigi Spagnol died of cancer, a publisher best known for bringing Harry Potter into Italian before it became world famous. His obituary in Corriere Della Sera. The two had been together around 4 years, for half of which Spagnol had been ill with the condition.

This, if it is a novel (and Ørstavik seems unconvinced it is) is, in the terms of Javier Cercas in The Blind Spot: An Essay on the Novel, a novel-without-fiction, as it is the story told over ten days in January 2020 by a writer in the same situation as Ørstavik, written to her dying husband.

Indeed as explained in a joint interview with Aitken at the Reading in Translation website, the novel was written in real time:

In a way the book itself shows its own process. It’s all laid out in there, the text is written in present tense most of the time, and that is actually how it was. The Now in the novel, was the Now of the writing moment. It was completed in ten days, and I sent it to my publisher in Oslo. The editing was minimal. There it was.

While I was writing the novel, I would make notes every moment we were together during those ten days: in the hospital, at home, etc. He knew I was writing, and in a way I think he knew that I was writing about this, about us, about what was happening. He was so proud of me. He was always so happy when I was working on a project. But he never asked what it was about. He had so little strength. When the draft for the cover came in April or May, a couple of months before he died, we were sitting in the sofa having breakfast. The Norwegian cover is pale pink, with only the title in pale grey: somehow sober and silent. I showed it to him and I saw on his face that he understood. It was our novel.

[As an aside, I was pleased to see And Other Stories, whose cover work is a strength of their books. respect the original design, although the US publisher has replaced with with their house style].

This is a powerful and at times harrowing read, sparing little detail of the realities of a dying cancer patient, and of the thoughts, not always totally loving, that Ørstavik has (for example, she admits to falling in love with her host on a reading tour in Mexico).

If the reader then wonders why Ørstavik needed to deal with suffering (and forward-grief) this way, she explains how she was not able to talk to her husband about what was happening, as he was reluctant to acknowledge the terminal nature of his condition, so she could only address him through the book. He too took solace in his own writing - see the opening quote.

And she also draws throughout the book on the work of the Swedish author Birgitta Trotzig, this from the preface to her Ett landskap, Jaget och världen:

When it comes to what really happens to me, in life, I'm struck into silence. Silence! Stop sign — zone border! It becomes physically almost impossible for me to as much as register facts, dates — at least periodically. The real-life event hits me, massively burdensome and complicated, overwhelmingly intangible — and transforms all speech, any form of direct articulation, into an unreal rustling of leaves. But still I know I must write, says Birgitta Trotzig. And yet, the whole time, I sense deepest down, as strongly as if it were the life force itself, the desire to survive, that somehow I must connect with that real-life event in words, reach out to it, engage with it, take warmth from it.

(a longer extract, in a translation by Brad Harmon can be found here).

Impressive, powerful, moving, harrowing, necessary - 4.5 stars to be rounded up/down as my calibration for the year progresses.


Bibliography of English Translations

This is the fourth of the author's works to appear in English:

The first, translated by Deborah Dawkin, was The Blue Room, published by Peirene Press in 2014, from the original Like sant som jeg er virkelig (1999).

The second, Love, translated by Martin Aitken from the 1997 novel Kjærlighet, was published in the US by Archipelago Books in 2018 and in the UK by And Other Stories in 2019. The book was a Finalist (i.e. shortlisted) in the US National Book Awards for Translated Literature, and in the UK shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, and Aitken won the 2019 PEN Translation Prize: my review.

The Pastor, also translated by Martin Aitken, was the third, from the original Presten (2004) which won both the Klassekampen's Literary Award and Brage Prize. My review, which was only published in the US by Archipelago.

[Kathleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I wander through the days, knowing that you’re dying, only somehow I can’t feel it. It’s ungraspable, that you’re going to die. I don’t know what it is. How it is.”

Tread carefully.

Reading is a way to expand your experience. Sometimes it’s to a country you’ve never been to or a completely foreign lifestyle. Sometimes it’s darker. This book took me to a place that I hope I won’t have to go in real life, but know the odds aren’t in my favor. It’s heart-wrenching and tragic, but also honest and eye-opening.

Ti amo means I love you, and if I remember my long-ago Italian, it’s the familiar ti and the romantic amo. It’s the simple phrase the author and her husband say to each other repeatedly, as they experience his declining health and eventual death from pancreatic cancer.

“You who are home to me, my sky.”

Both writers who have traveled the world in their four short years together, they live in Milan during this experience, and this book is an account of her journey through it.

The writing is beautiful. I wanted to look away, but I couldn’t.

[Vesna · Rating 4 out of 5]

The next day I wrote the first words of this, whatever it is. I love you, I wrote. I love you, I write, I say, when you come through the door in the evenings. You still come through the door when it’s evening. For now, you’re here, with me. And what I’ve been writing is the most truthful way I’ve been able to be with you, with all that cannot be said between us in our days together. I’m not going anywhere, I’m here, and I’ll be here all the way until it’s you who isn’t here anymore.

(4.5)

[Janelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very personal and honest work. The author writes about her dying husband and all the things that aren’t said, only ‘Ti amo’. It’s gut wrenching in parts, her husbands pain and treatments, the lack of discussion about death even though the doctors have told her he has less than a year, but not the patient, he doesn’t appear to want to know. Moving and emotional.

[Alan (the Lone Librarian rides again) Teder · Rating 4 out of 5]

I Love You
Review of the And Other Stories paperback (2022) translated by Martin Aitken from the Norwegian language original Ti amo (2020).

Ti Amo (Italian: I Love You) is Norwegian author Hanne Ørstavik's fictionalized non-fiction novel about her life with Italian publisher and translator Luigi Spagnol (1961-2020) written while he was undergoing chemotherapy treatment for cancer prior to his death. I call it fictionalized as there are aspects which likely are different from the real-life events e.g. in Ti Amo the husband (who isn't named) is writing a science fiction novel on his smartphone prior to his death, whereas Ørstavik's Norwegian Wikipedia page says that Spagnol was translating her novel Roman. Milano into Italian. The real-life Spagnol could have been doing both of course.


Author Hanne Ørstavik with her husband Luigi Spagnol prior to his death in 2020. Image sourced from the online pages of the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet.

Although the fatal conclusion is known in advance, the book is still a beautiful evocation of the bond between the couple. It portrays their earlier happier life in flashbacks and is a memorial to their mutual affection. Ørstavik writes that it was a book that she had to write before she could move on in her life and other writing. This is I think the 4th book of Ørstavik in English translation, and several of them have also been translated by Martin Aitken.

I read Ti Amo through the Republic of Consciousness Book of the Month subscription for which it was the November 2022 selection.

[Kerry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Books on disease or almost anything medical have long fascinated me. Even in youth I was drawn to try to understand how one faces difficult physical illness and what can be learned from it. I built my career around it and even now in retirement I still wish to learn more about how one copes with end of life events.
This is a beautiful but most sad account of a couple living with a terminal cancer diagnosis after only a few years of marriage. The wife, Hanne Orstavik is a Norwegian writer and her husband her Italian publisher. They have been wed only 4 years, both in their 50's at the time of this memoir. She writes in beautiful language the story of her husband's illness, both the early stages and its progression. It is not an easy read but is narrated with great heart by Madeleine Dauer.
I would doubt than any of us have not had at least an acquaintance with someone who has faced and dealt with a cancer diagnoses. There is much to be gleamed from this beautiful, thoughtful writing and how difficult it can be to face the end of life with another.
Highly recommend this book. I will be searching out more of this author's writing.

[John Darnielle · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a quietly astonishing book – not a line, not a word out of place. The pacing of the story is masterful. It’s about terminal illness, and the effect that it can have on a partner who is not terminally ill, but it’s more than that. Read it, it won’t take more than an afternoon or two. Unforgettable.

[Laura Gotti · Rating 3 out of 5]

È il primo libro che ho letto quest'anno e devo dire che sono partita in salita. Non conoscevo la scrittrice e non conoscevo la vicenda, ho letto una cosa di sfuggita e in libreria mi è capitato sotto il naso con la sua copertina bellissima, quindi non potevo non comprarlo.
Una donna perde il suo compagno, stanno insieme da poco, hanno poco più di 50 anni e hanno ceduto a un colpo di fulmine che quando ti capita uno si sente benedetto dal cielo, ma poi lui, l'editore, si ammala, e si capisce fin da subito che le speranze saranno poche ma la malattia sarà lunga. Hanne Orstavik racconta il suo ultimo viaggio insieme a Luigi Spagnol, editore e non solo. È quindi tutto vero, una storia narrata in prima persona con tutto il dolore che ne consegue e delle riflessioni che ho trovato dure e non scontate.

Un buon libro, difficile e tremendo per far partire un anno, ma sono contenta di averlo letto. Sono poche pagine, intrise di dolore, di una buona scrittura, di amore e mai, mai morbose.

[CanadianReader · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an intense, introspective, and even claustrophobic work, and evidently an autobiographical one. For Archipelago Books, its publisher, it is an “uncategorized” title—not definitively fiction or autobiography. The subject matter is painful. In it the unnamed narrator, a writer, addresses her sensitive, intelligent husband (also unnamed)—a successful publisher who once aspired to be an artist. He is dying of pancreatic cancer.

Their relationship has not been a long one—four years. They married only the previous summer, in August 2019. After his diagnosis, the narrator’s partner wanted to affirm their love in a formal union. In this man, the writer had, for the first time, found home and a sense of belonging. She had also moved from Oslo to Milan. One of the questions for her now is how she will continue without him. Her main preoccupation, however, is with her husband’s unwillingness or inability to acknowledge that he is dying. The writer has always believed herself to be a person committed to the truth—facing it head-on—yet she finds she cannot broach the subject with him. His doctors also do not. Their philosophy is that if the patient is not asking questions, they do not supply information that could deprive him of hope. The oncologist comments that the narrator too has not been seeking clarification.

For close to two years, since her partner began to experience concerning symptoms, the writer has been unable to write. She rereads a notebook entry from months before in which she observed: “It’s as if the writing in me has withdrawn — tactfully, almost — not wanting to bother me in these times.” After a trip to a book fair in Guadalajara, Mexico, she feels a return of life energy and purpose, recognizing that the novel she has begun—this novel, Ti Amo, now before the reader—“is the life I live on the inside and it fetches things up from different times and separate layers that I often don’t realize need to meet, so that I can be with them, the way you might sit on the edge of a bed in the evening and hold the hand of a child, just being there, for the novel possesses an insight so much deeper than my own, and because it’s in touch with this very life force itself, it knows so much better than I do where the wave of each new novel is going to take me. But since . . . you [the husband] became ill, it’s been completely impossible for me to write . . . your coming meant that I moved forward, I came home. But now you’re going to die, you, who allowed me at last to find that home with you, and how am I going to move forward from that, here and now?”

During the pandemic, I read a short piece by a retired doctor whose wife had recently died (not from the virus). He noted that during the course of her final illness, she had not wanted to speak about her death. In the end she thanked him for “letting her go gently.” It occurs to me that people have their own way of leaving this life. It can be hard work to let go. Sometimes a lot of talking about “the truth” is not the path for everyone. You can know things in your own time and your own way. Doing a lot of talking isn’t everyone’s way.

[Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received this book as part of my subscription to the Republic of Consciousness Book Club which delivers a small press book through my letterbox once a month. This can be a mixed blessing because I’ve ploughed through some books I wouldn’t normally have read but I have also discovered some works of beauty.

Ti Amo sits in the “works of beauty” category, although it is a hard book to read. In 2020, Hanne Ørstavik lost her husband to cancer and this feels like an autobiographical memoir rather than a novel - the protagonist is an author who has written books with the same titles os Ørstavik’s, for example. One thread of this short book documents the couple’s life together as his illness progresses. It is sometimes harrowing (I lost a younger sister to cancer a few years ago and you never get over it) and always brutally honest. It brought to mind a book I read and hated a few months ago “The Passing Of The Forms We Have Loved” in which the protagonist is witness to his father dying from cancer. That book was written in a way that completely turned me off (a rare 1-star read). This book, however, is written and translated (by Martin Aitken) in a way that pulls you in and drags you through. It’s hard to put it down once you get started.

There’s a second thread to the narrative in which the protagonist/author reviews incidents from her past. In these we learn a bit more about her husband and his past as well as seeing how she has tried to cope with his illness.

It’s pretty bleak, to be honest, and there’s never a light at the end of the tunnel. It’s a powerful meditation on relationships, grief and loss. It’s often brutal, often very tender. It’s uncomfortable to read but, at the same time, I am glad I read it.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful and sad.

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The August 2022 selection from my Archipelago Books subscription is a lovely, quiet story about a woman writer caring for her dying husband while keeping her career going. Hanne Orstavik is admired in Norway, has written many novels including Love, a 2018 National Book Award finalist.

I have no idea whether or not Ti Amo (I love you) is autobiographical or complete fiction. The narrator and her husband have a deep love, found in mid life. He is a publisher in Italy, where they live. She is Norwegian. He has pancreatic cancer but thinks he can beat it.

For anyone who has cared for a loved one who is very ill, the story will ring true. The wife keeps a close eye, participates in his care, but they don't talk about death. She is pretty sure that will be the outcome though and keeps a daily journal which is the book I read.

The prose is sure-handed, as is the translation. The emotion of the woman is relayed beautifully and the novella length keeps it from being too much. In fact, it is perfectly just enough.

[Sarah ~ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ti Amo - Hanne Ørstavik



"All I can do is be here, beside you."

"... it’s hard for the one who’s ill, but much worse in a way for the one who isn’t"

"I love you, I write, I say, when you come through the door in the evenings. You still come through the door when it’s evening. For now, you’re here, with me. And what I’ve been writing is the most truthful way I’ve been able to be with you, with all that cannot be said between us in our days together. I’m not going anywhere, I’m here, and I’ll be here all the way until it’s you who isn’t here anymore."



مقاربة جديدة للخسارة والفقد والمعاناة، حيث يستند العمل إلى تجربة الكاتبة هانا إرستافيك الخاصة في فقدان زوجها الإيطالي بسبب السرطان.


~


فجر يوم الإثنين، غرّة شهر رمضان - 1445 هـ

[Phyllis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This short novel comes sideways at anticipatory grief when the love of your life is dying, and how not to die along with them.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ørstavik wrote this in the early months of 2020 while she was living in Milan with her husband, Luigi Spagnol, who was her Italian publisher as well as a painter. They had only been together for four years and he’d been ill for half of that. The average life expectancy for someone who had undergone his particular type of pancreatic cancer surgery was 15–20 months; “We’re at fifteen months now.” Indeed, Spagnol would die in June 2020. But Ørstavik writes from that delicate in-between time when the outcome is clear but hasn’t yet arrived:

What’s real is that you’re still here, and at the same time, as if embedded in that, the fact that soon you’re going to die. Often I don’t feel a thing.

She knows, having heard it straight from his doctor’s lips, that her husband is going to die in a matter of months, but he doesn’t know. And now he wants to host a New Year’s Eve party, as is their annual tradition. Ørstavik skips between the present, the couple’s shared past, and an incident from her recent past that she hasn’t yet told anyone else: not long ago, while in Mexico for a literary festival, she fell in love with A., her handler. And while she hasn’t acted on that, beyond a kiss on the cheek, it’s smouldering inside her, a secret from the husband she still loves and can’t bear to hurt. Novels are where she can be most truthful, and she knows the one she needs to write will be healing.

There are many wrenching scenes and moments here, but it’s all delivered in a fairly flat style that left little impression on me. I wonder if I’d appreciate her fiction more.

Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

A gorgeous and honest elegy from a writer to her spouse suffering through the late, painful stages of cancer.

[Federica Rampi · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Tu a cui io appartengo.”

Fragile (come la vita) assillante (come la morte)
"Ti amo" è un romanzo breve ma monumentale, straziante e tenero, un libro sulla sofferenza, sulla solitudine che provoca la morte, ma anche su come superarla e guardare vita

Ci si può preparare alla morte se non se ne può parlare?

Lei scrive. Lui sta morendo.
Nel romanzo autobiografico Hanne Ørstavik scrive di quello che sa ma lui non vuole sapere: che sta per morire.
Vivono insieme solo da pochi anni la scrittrice norvegese e il suo editore italiano Luigi Spagnol, e il tanto atteso amore per la vita si trasforma presto in un addio che lei tiene a bada scrivendo di lui.
Un diario delle malattia e dei sentimenti scritto con l’urgenza di chi sa di avere a che fare con un maledetto conto alla rovescia, che è impossibile fermare.
Ti Amo è una potente descrizione del processo di perdita
Del tempo che ci vuole per metabolizzare
Del sentirsi in lutto prima del tempo
Un libro bellissimo sull’enorme potere delle parole

[Taran Halvorsen · Rating 2 out of 5]

«ti amo» er første boken jeg leser av Hanne Ørstavik, noe jeg skulle ønske ikke var tilfelle. Romanen føles mer selvbiografisk enn skjønnlitterært, noe som også kom frem fra avsnittene der fortelleren beskriver skriveprosessen til andre romaner. Jeg fikk mer lyst til å lese romanene hun beskrev, enn denne. Det ble til tider litt for mye «dagboktekst», og virket for meg som en roman skrevet som utløp for forfatterens følelser.

Jeg kan kjenne meg igjen i mange av følelsene og situasjonene Ørstavik beskriver. Jeg har selv stått i en lignende posisjon. På grunnlag av dette vil jeg også tenke at jeg skulle føle mer ubehag enn det jeg gjorde. Jeg er også usikker på hva forfatteren egentlig ønsket å fortelle i romanen. Var det mannens sykdom, og hvordan han taklet denne? Var det hvordan hun selv opplevde sykdommen? Da A dukket opp, rundt halvveis i romanen, ble jeg enda mer forvirret. For meg var nok avsnittene mellom jeg-et og A de sterkeste, men jeg forsto likevel ikke hvorfor deres forhold var satt inn i denne konteksten.

Selvfølgelig var det noen pene setninger som fikk meg til å stoppe opp og tenke eller føle noe mer, slik som denne: «Jeg var sjalu på smertene dine.» og «Det er ikke hjemme mer å se inn i øynene dine.» Så ja, jeg mislikte ikke alt. Og som sagt var jeg aller mest fascinert av forholdet mellom jeg-et og A, og hvordan dette endret henne: «Men etter Guadalajara forsto jeg at jeg hadde skrudd min egen livsbrann veldig ned for å være i kontakt med din.» Dette mener jeg er en nydelig tolkning av følelsene, noe jeg selv har slitt med å sette ord på. Jeg skulle gjerne likt og lest en roman som handlet mer om dette, og mindre om mannens liv før sykdommen.

Kanskje det er jeg som forventet litt for mye da jeg gikk inn i denne romanen. Kanskje jeg forventet noe annet, noe som kunne vekke følelser jeg prøver å fortrenge. Uansett hva som var årsaken, kan jeg ikke si at denne romanen var noe for meg. Men jeg har ikke mistet interessen for Ørstavik sitt forfatterskap, jeg skal absolutt prøve meg på fler av romanene hennes for å se om disse treffer bedre, og da er vel den beste romanen å begynne på Roman. Milano som så mye blir beskrevet i «ti amo».

[Afi (WhatAfiReads) · Rating 5 out of 5]

For a seemingly simple storyline, this book left you feeling helpless, heart aching for the narrator and it you feel as though you've just finished a long marathon with tears all the way from the start to the finish.

"“But now you’re going to die, you, who allowed me at last to find that home with you, and how am I going to move forward from that, here and now?”

Ti amo is the story of an unnamed narrator - written in journal entries back and forth, of her days with her husband who was diagnosed with cancer. From her reminiscent to the early days before her husband was ill to the looming day awaiting for death to come; is a story that will leave you claustrophobic, dense with emotions and a feeling of helplessness and on death and sickness and how its cruel for both the patient and the caretaker.

Personal Ratings : 4.75🌟

For a book I randomly picked after going through multiple predictions for the 2023 International Booker Prize Longlist , the story not only packs a punch, it left me feeling so much at 1.30 AM and staring into space for a good solid 10 minutes. Its a love story but is more than that. Its of grief in a different form, of the call of death that seemed far but looms on your daily lives, and its on the hardships of seeing your loved ones lose themselves over a virus that no one has control over - in which you lost a part of yourself as well.

“I’ve been feeling so very low. It feels like it’s never going to be possible to ever feel happy again, buoyantly happy, the kind of happiness I used to know, in which the thought of death was quite absent. I think that from now on any happiness I feel will be tinged with death."

Ørstavik did a wonderful job in her narration. Not only that its compelling, the proses are easy to read and leaves you tuning and wanting more. In fact, after each paragraph, I was left feeling breathless, trying to catch my breath as I process the emotions of the narrator. Its almost like the images that the author painted is vivid , passing through like an old movie - narrated through the story of the unnamed narrator. Ørstavik had managed to transport us readers to Milan, and to the places that the narrator went as an author, and to the places that she had experienced with her husband whilst he was still able to get up around. Every emotion, every despair and every pain that the narrator felt was brilliantly conveyed through the story, and it left my heart just aching and wanting to give her a big hug.

"Being happy in that way feels like not even being in the world anymore. And for a long time just looking at you was painful to me, I couldn’t look at you without the knowledge that you’re going to die, your eyes, everything about you said death to me."

Stories on diseases and caretakers always gets me hard. From seeing your loved ones slowly losing themselves and the pain that the caretaker has to undergo as well - is an emotion that is not easy to process at most. Ørstavik brought forward the intensity of the narrator's feelings through her writing. The relationship with death and how at the end of the day, is an affair that only you alone can face it - even if you're surrounded with your loved ones. What I love is that the author not only manage to show that not only the idea of death affects the patient, it affects the person that is left behind as well. Having to handle with grief - and the very idea to live forward without the memory of a person that you're used to be with every day of your life.

“For now, you’re here, with me. And what I’ve been writing is the most truthful way I’ve been able to be with you, with all that cannot be said between us in our days together. I’m not going anywhere, I’m here, and I’ll be here all the way until it’s you who isn’t here anymore.”

This is more than just a love affair. Its of two souls who came together and fitted a piece of another. Its about a disease that robbed their happiness with the idea of death looming in their lives. Its on grief and the many ways to cope with it. And mostly, its on the belief of love; on the profession of love - Ti Amo - in ways that means more than just words.

Compelling and heartbreaking and definitely a read that will linger with me for a very, very long time.

[Areeb Ahmad (Bankrupt_Bookworm) · Rating 5 out of 5]

"And for a long time just looking at you was painful to me, I couldn’t look at you without the knowledge that you’re going to die, your eyes, everything about you said death to me. And even though it’s not that acute anymore, it still won’t pass, now it’s quieter in a way, normal almost, death has become an attendant presence, everything’s just the way it is, I’m here with you and soon you won’t be there anymore."

Strangely enough, this is my first book by Hanne Ørstavik. It definitely won't be the last. Ti Amo, "I love you" in Italian, is quite autobiographical with the main duo modeled after Hanne Ørstavik and her now late husband, Luigi Spagnol. It is a fairly short novel but certainly not slight. Written over just ten days in the "now" of the present tense as Ørstavik took notes while she cared for Spagnol, accompanied him to the doctors, and spent time with him at home, there is a sense of immediacy and depths of melancholy. She candidly depicts palliative care and the impending loss of one's love.

Ørstavik is particularly good at how she portrays the bewilderment of death and the stamping out of a life dreamt together, both for the one who is dying and the one who'll be left behind. She also doesn't portray the narrator as perfect. Her mind wanders from her partner, she develops feelings for someone she meets at an event, and she has fatigue. I had loved Martin Aitken's translation of Olga Ravn's The Employees from the Danish. He has translated Ti Amo from the Norwegian, ably rendering "dislocated, wispy threads of emotion" of the original into English. A phenomenal book.


(I received a finished copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.)

[Fr.Martinsen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jeg er irritert fra andre side. Smertene til mannen hun lever sammen med tiltar, og Hanne Ørstavik skriver at hun aldri tenkte han var ordentlig syk, men at han ikke var glad i henne mer.

Jeg er også irritert når hun skriver: «Det har vært deg og meg og døden så lenge nå, men på en måte er det deg, og så er det meg og døden på den andre siden, for vi snakker ikke om døden.»

Sånn er det jo slett ikke. Hvor altomveltende det enn er å være alene med døden på din side, så er det han og døden. Det er noe ganske annet.

Men det er klart. Det Hanne Ørstavik forteller er hvordan det ser ut på hennes side. Og sånn sett er setningen god.

Det er bra om den som skal dø vil snakke. Likevel virker døden som en ensom ting, også når den er et stykke på avstand, en katastrofe så voldsom at tanken er vanskelig å holde mer enn øyeblikk, langt mindre ta noen andre inn til den. Det er for ambisiøst. Jeg tror ikke det går an å komme inn dit jeg oppfatter at hun vil.

Jeg liker ikke at hun fletter inn en person A i grunnhistorien. Jeg trenger ikke den delen.

Slutten blir jeg bare irritert av, jeg liker ikke måten teksten plutselig blir utydelig på. Jeg syns det er juks. Jeg kjenner meg tvunget. Men jeg har lav toleranse for språk jeg synes er jålete.

Jeg er likevel takknemlig for at hun forteller meg historien. Som fysiske beskrivelser, det konkrete med medisiner og det som er inni kroppen. Eller beskrivelser av hvordan de samler seg om å være sammen om fuglene på brettet, eller hvordan hun ikke er så modig likevel, som hun først tror.

[Joseph Schreiber · Rating 5 out of 5]

With a most unsettling in-the-momentness, an unnamed narrator whose life closely parallels that of Ørstavik's own, writes her way to some understanding of what is happening inside herself and within her relationship as her husband—who again parallels her own—battles an aggressive cancer. There is little distance here, the original Norwegian edition cane out in the same year that Ørstavik's publisher husband died, yet this is not a memoir or a novel about grief, it is a meditation on the myriad of emotions that come before there is the time and space to grieve. It's about grasping at normal and failing, being unable to address or acknowledge the inevitable.
Longer review can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2022/08/27/th...

[Rachel Louise Atkin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a short novel about a woman whose husband finds out he has cancer and how she is preparing to deal with the grief of losing the person she loves most in the world. It was written really beautifully and there are some really loving, eloquent and sad moments in the book. I gave it three stars because I felt like I didn’t really connect to it on an emotional level as much as I wanted to which is sad because I wanted to be really moved by it and I just wasn’t to a huge extent. But I certainly can appreciate what a beautiful book and tragic story this was. The last page in particular did really strike me and so I will be reading more of Orstavik’s work.

[Mack · Rating 4 out of 5]

I quite liked this personal account of deep love and mortality — it’s beautiful to be able to read all the words Ørstavik couldn’t say aloud to her dying spouse, and to meditate on what isn’t being said when we’re instead saying “i love you”, something that I think about often. Broke my heart, I was reading this behind the counter at the bookshop and had to stop myself from crying a few times while on display. Happy to have received an advanced copy, thank you archipelago.

[Marianne Barron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Grunnleggende gripende og svært god bok!

Omtale på bloggen min:

https://ebokhyllami.blogspot.com/2021...

[Adrian Alvarez · Rating 5 out of 5]

"We've been through so many phases in the time you've been ill, but after we got married in the Summer, you'd been ill for a year then, and for a long time it was as if everything was all about getting that done, getting married, as if that was our focal point, the thing we were moving towards instead of death, and we were going there together, but after we got married there was nothing ahead of us anymore, nothing we had to look forward to together. All there is now is that you're going to die. And you say you're not. So we're not together in that, or at least it's not something we talk about, but still its the point towards which we're heading now." - pg 72

This book hit me like a bag of hammers. I'll be honest, I had no idea what it was about. I've read and enjoyed Orstavik's novel, Love, and that should have tipped me off that a novel from her titled Ti Amo might not be a romantic, feel-good affair. So here I am, in Honolulu, on a beach, pulling out my sun time reading and a few hours later I'm fighting back tears and trying not to ruminate too much on my own mortality.

Yes, this is a crushing novel about a writer's husband's decline due to stomach cancer, but no this is not cheap or gimmicky in the slightest. Orstavik has a masterful handle on the craft of writing and her ability to sustain a first person voice for the duration of these pages and still layer a depth of themes and philosophical considerations without ever once dropping her emotional connection to the excruciating transformation at hand is a testament to her abilities.

Highly recommended.