Review: Ti Amo by Hanne Ørstavik

This book is an incredible feat. It is the diary pages of a woman a year or so into her husband’s diagnosis with pancreatic cancer, relating the transformative effect his illness had on their relationship and their lives. The author captures these ruminations in stark, breath-taking prose. Her narrator struggles to put the pieces of her life into a timeline, to make it make sense — when did the illness start? Who were they then? Who are they now? She weaves in past and present, existential and inconsequential, discovering herself as she writes (“...without anyone else knowing, and without me knowing either, because it’s something I’m not aware of until now, as I sit here writing again.”)

When halfway through reading the book, I learned that the author’s husband died shortly after she wrote this novella, following a similar fight with cancer. The work being one of autofiction answers some of the mysteries I had about how someone could write something so intensely and darkly introspective. It gave me a few new questions to ponder about how someone could take what must have been such a swirl of emotion, the most harrowing years of her life, and turn it into a story that a complete stranger can understand, can be moved by.

The narrator-author addresses her diary to you, her husband. It’s a powerful choice, from its opening lines drawing the reader into the intimacy of her relationship:

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.

The book is called Ti Amo, "I love you" in Italian, and is, in a way, that “something else” the narrator wants to say in place of "I love you." The story itself is a tragedy, not only because her husband’s cancer proves terminal, but because it is the tale of two people who can’t sail through the storms together. With death looming on the horizon, the two of them cannot talk about death with each other.

The way I look into your eyes and at the same time, always, know that you’re going to die. It’s been you and me and death for so long now. Although in a way it’s just you, with me and death on the other side, because we don’t talk about death. I can’t understand how you can manage not to talk about it. I can only believe that somewhere inside you you do think about it. Are you not talking about it for my sake? It leaves us each alone with it.

For her, it seems she wants him to bring it up, to choose a time when he is ready for it. For him, he seems to keep the possibility out of mind, refusing to confront it. And so this gulf between them grows ever larger, amplified by his doctors’ decisions to withhold the prognosis from him (“He needs hope, something to cling to.”). By addressing her diary to you, the husband, the narrator creates the dialogue she longs for, a hundred-page conversation about death. Yet the hoped-for catharsis never arrives: the “you” she writes to cannot respond, and the reader cannot stand in for him. That absence is the tragedy.

We, the reader, don’t learn the resolution of it all. In that way, we are like the husband. We don’t see the final moments, or how she processes this intense period of her life, once she is no longer in the depths of it. The darkness of terminal illness is a novella. The life afterwards, the grieving, perhaps a novel.