Ti Amo

‘I love you’ is one of the most conventional phrases, not open to customisation. But Hanne Ørstavik’s Ti Amo, whose narrator charts the two years following her partner’s diagnosis with terminal pancreatic cancer, remakes these words, returning to them all their complexity, vitality and pain. In her agony, it is to writing that Ti Amo’s narrator turns, and Ti Amo shines with writing of beauty, delicacy and truth. Its sentences swoop and fly. Addressed to the narrator’s partner – ‘you’ – throughout, Ti Amo is an extraordinary book about the truth of all relationships. After reading it, the words ‘I love you’ feel different in the mouth.

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From the very first page, the first sentence, there’s this honesty of voice. A voice weighted with dread and waiting but also shaky with love and wonder. A magnificent translation of a life-companion of a book.

Kate Briggs

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