• Ti Amo
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Archipelago Books

Ti Amo

Ti Amo

by Hanne Ørstavik, translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken

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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. Hanne Ørstavik writes, “I have a compulsion for truth that feels like my very life force itself.” Tentative, 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.

Additional Book Information

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9781953861443
Pages: 128
Publication Date:

Praise

Ørstavik sketches a spare but capacious meditation on both the shape of [her characters’] relationship and the effort required, practically and emotionally, by the narrator to care for her partner through the end of his life . . . The narrator maintains a controlled—but not cold—distance that only enriches the intimacy throughout . . . 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.
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

The novel shares a compassionate vision, bridging the gulf between the one who will go on and the one who will not ... A remarkably frank and finely sieved account of two people approaching the ultimate parting of the ways.
—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

A slim, devastating . . . novel driven by a search for an answer to this question: what is the truth of another’s death?
—Kevin Brazil, Times Literary Supplement

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