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 author, 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 (2019) into Italian. The real-life Spagnol could have been doing both of course.

See photograph at https://www.dagbladet.no/images/72617189.jpg?imageId=72617189&x=0&y=7.04...
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. ( )

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. Talking about “the truth” is not the path for everyone. You can know things in your own time and your own way. ( )