Ti Amo
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A penetrating study of passion, suffering, and loss from one of Norway’s most tenacious writers: National Book Award Finalist and PEN translation prize winner Hanne Ørstavik
Celebrated throughout the world for her candor and sensitivity to the rhythms of language, Hanne Ørstavik is a leading light on the international stage. Ørstavik writes with “a compulsion for truth that feels like [her] very life force itself.” Laced with a tingling frankness, Ørstavik’s prose adheres so closely to the inner workings of its narrator’s mind as to nearly undo itself. In Martin Aitken’s translation, Ørstavik’s piercing story sings.
Ti Amo brings a new, deeply personal approach, as the novel is based in Ørstavik’s own experience of losing her Italian husband to cancer. By facing loss directly, she includes readers in an experience that many face in isolation. Written and set in the early months of 2020, its themes of loss and suffering are particularly well suited for a time of international mourning.
What can be found within a gaze? What lies inside a painting or behind a handful of repeated words? These are the questions that haunt our unnamed narrator as she tends to her husband, stricken with cancer, in the final months of his life.
She examines the elements of their life together: their Vietnamese rose-colored folding table where they eat their meals, each of the New Year’s Eves they’ve shared, their friendships, and their most intimate exchanges.
With everything in flux, she searches for the facets that will remain.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ørstavik (The Pastor) offers a remarkable depiction of love and loss in this powerful elegaic narrative. The unnamed narrator, a Norwegian writer, addresses her partner, an Italian publisher, who is dying from pancreatic cancer. "What I've been writing," the narrator explains to him, "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." Thus Ørstavik sketches a spare but capacious meditation on both the shape of their relationship and the effort required, practically and emotionally, by the narrator to care for her partner through the end of his life. Where scenes might become cloying or melodramatic, the narrator maintains a controlled—but not cold—distance that only enriches the intimacy throughout, suffusing the mundane (refilling prescriptions) and the visceral (loss of bowel control) with frankness and tenderness. Various phrases and riffs on the word love, including ti amo, sustain an incantatory power, and the brevity of this striking text makes its final moments soar. "I'll do anything for you," the speaker tells her partner. "But writing it down here it feels like so little." In Ørstavik's skilled hands, a little becomes so much more.
