This post discusses end-stage cancer.

I’ve read two previous novellas by Norwegian author Hanne Ørstavik, Love (1997), and The Blue Room (1999). Both are incredibly tough reads about abusive parent/child relationships, but brilliantly written. Her portrayal of the pain in familial relationships is just as unflinching in ti amo (2020, transl. Martin Aitken 2022, 93 pages), but here she considers a loving romantic partnership, and what happens when one of the couple is facing end-stage cancer. It’s my first read for Novellas in November, hosted by Cathy at 746 Books and Bookish Beck and it’s given me a very strong start.

We are plunged immediately into the altered existence that the narrator and her partner are living (it is a novella, but autofiction) as they try to manage the last part of his life. There is both intimacy and distance:

“Once, I would reach out in the night to touch your skin, to place my hand on your back, your stomach, your thigh, anywhere at all, and there’d be connection, contact. And in that feeling of skin and warmth, something so small and without language, something perhaps undeveloped in me, a new born part, could sink down to sense the base of night, return home, or arrive. I love you. But you are no longer in your body, I don’t know where you are. Awash in morphine, you drift in and out of sleep or languor, and we do not talk about death, I love you, you say to me instead”

The narrator writes about how she values truth so highly, and as a reader I thought this was visible in Ørstavik’s unflinching gaze across her work. In ti amo, she doesn’t shy away from portraying the physical indignities the person diagnosed suffers; these are very hard passages to read. Nor does she portray the narrator as a perfect, self-sacrificing angel. It felt incredibly, almost brutally honest, including acknowledgement of how what is written isn’t always entirely the truth.

The narrator’s striving for truth means she struggles with the obfuscation around prognosis. Her partner doesn’t want to know, which she respects, but she is also furious with the situation and the silence from the medical team:

“Why can’t we speak the truth? Why can’t we say things the way they are? Why do they have to hide your death from you? Do you really not want to know, not to be in contact with, not to feel, the truth of yourself?”

She also captures the constant anticipatory grief that she carries:

“I feel as if I’ve come home when I look into your eyes. 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.”

It is an incredibly sad book, as you would expect, not least because the narrator explains how much she had to overcome in life to get to where she could enter a loving relationship. Having reached that point, she meets her Italian partner, and after just a few years, their time together will be over.

“I’ve always thought there was something contrived about it when people go on about being so sensitive to death, being afraid of death. How can they, I’ve always wondered, these living people? I’ve struggled so hard just to feel the heart beating in my chest, to feel there’s something there that’s alive inside me, and not just steel and stone. Death would come all in good time. And then you came.”

There are moments of ordinary, tender intimacy too, as the couple have to navigate a way to find touchpoints when one of their bodies is failing:

“We watched the birds, their comings and goings, and you know the names of all the various kinds, you tell me what they’re called in Italian. And we sit there looking out instead of at each other, we talk about them and are together in that, instead of in what we see when we look at each other and don’t talk about.”

I’ve never experienced the death of a partner. But I’ve witnessed a lot of moments in my work over 27 years, and from my outsiders view Ørstavik captured so much, writing tenderly, angrily and honestly about the experience.

“I can’t do anything to help you. I can’t do anything for myself either, apart from that, finish the novel. Because it’s what I do. I write novels. It’s my way of existing in the world, I make a space for myself, although novel makes a space for me, we do it together, and that’s where I can be, inside the novel.”