Ti Amo by Hanne Ørstavik
Ti Amo's protagonist must find intimacy and longing in the mundane everyday, when she learns the love of her life has less than a year to live
How do we articulate loss? More so, how do we articulate a loss yet to happen? Ti Amo is an anticipatory grief diary brought alive – the protagonist, a woman who has moved to Milan for the love of her life, must contend with the fact that he has been diagnosed with cancer. He is dying.
Death lurks in the everyday – he doesn’t want to know how long there is left, but she does. Less than one year. So begins a documenting of almost mundanity: ‘This morning I put two of the cakes out on the makeshift bird table you’ve cobbled together.’ Life continues, gradually, almost insignificantly, and yet significance finds itself in the innocuous. Rest, eat, travel, continue, day after day.
It is deeply intimate and harrowing – words and questions unable to be said but instead carried as a weight internally. In fewer than 100 pages this persists – from the opening ‘I love you’ to the last, Ti Amo is a complex look at grief, love and loneliness, longing, not veiled within a wider narrative or hidden under layers. The pain sits plainly on the page, challenging readers to either step away or carry this weight with them. It is a novel that confronts some of the hardest realities of our inevitable fate, to lose those close to us, and is tender and heartrending at once.
And Other Stories, 6 Sep