It’s in the eyes

In Hanne Ørstavik’s​ novel Ti Amo (2020), the narrator, an unnamed Norwegian writer, finds her life structured by the rhythms of illness. Her husband, the Italian publisher of her books, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2018. When the novel opens, in Milan in early January 2020, she is counting the days – eight – until her husband’s next MRI. And the years – two – since he had a bout of vomiting in Venice. Was he already ill then? Fifteen months have elapsed since a surgeon removed his tumour, his spleen, parts of his stomach and a section of his colon. The pain remains agonising, and he spends most of his days in bed, fully dressed; only Fentanyl, often unavailable, provides relief.

The looming test will reveal whether the lump on his abdomen is scar tissue from surgery or another cancerous growth. But his fate is clear: the cancer has already spread to the liver. The narrator knows that recovery is impossible, though her husband shows no sign of understanding this. In front of the doctors, he seems incurious about his prognosis and asks no questions when they address him with their ‘mealy-mouthed pretence’. (‘He needs hope, something to cling to,’ one of them tells the narrator.) He worries that he’ll need further surgery but, had he been attentive, he’d have understood that the doctors won’t operate again. The narrator and her husband say ‘ti amo’ – I love you – instead of discussing his approaching death. She finds his behaviour confounding. ‘Do you really not want to know, not be in contact with, not feel, the truth about yourself?’ she wonders. Being truthful is her ‘life force’, an imperative – as much aesthetic as moral – that she’s aimed to uphold in both her books and her relationships. ‘It makes me ill when I go against that force, when I go against myself.’ The scan offers the possibility that she and her husband can move into a new phase. The narrative tension, then, rests on whether or not they will finally talk about death.

The difficulty of being in contact with ‘the truth about yourself’ is a theme that runs through Ørstavik’s work. In her three earlier novels translated into English, the protagonists are often thwarted by a lack of self-understanding. In Love (1997), which unfolds over a single night in northern Norway, Jon thinks endlessly of the celebration he imagines his mother, Vibeke, is planning for his ninth birthday. Vibeke, meanwhile, focuses on anything but Jon, among them a travelling carnival worker with whom she invents a romance. Johanne, the twenty-something narrator of The Blue Room (1999), spends the day locked in her bedroom, reflecting on the events that led up to her confinement: a new relationship, disagreement with her manipulative mother. Subtle inconsistencies cast doubt on her truthfulness, but it’s not always clear to what degree her duplicity is intentional or a kind of self-deception. In The Pastor (2004), Liv, a theology student mourning a friend who recently killed herself, takes a job ministering to a congregation in a northern Norwegian fishing village. She begins to question the value of words: ‘I can dig through the language and all the understandings and still find nothing to grasp there, nothing I can hold up and say, here it is.’

Ørstavik has not been coy about the fact that Ti Amo is autobiographical. In 2019 she married Luigi Spagnol, the head of Gruppo editoriale Mauri Spagnol, not long after he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. When she began working on Ti Amo, six months before he died, it wasn’t with a novel in mind. (Ørstavik has said that she considers her book a ‘report from a moment in time’ and that it was her publisher who designated it as fiction; Norway doesn’t have a strong tradition of literary memoir.) With its day-by-day accounting of caregiving and anxiety, Ti Amo sometimes resembles a diary: ‘It’s 5 January 2020, 3.10 p.m., and we stopped by the Turks on Viale Papiniano and had a kebab for lunch, you drank two cans of Coke, it’s Sunday and the sun is shining.’ But the book, with its second-person address, can also be read as a kind of intimate letter. (Ørstavik has said that her husband was aware of it but never read it.) The writing is breathless: independent clauses separated by commas pile up in long sentences and anecdotes jump around in time. ‘We’d told everyone half past eight,’ she says of the New Year’s Eve party her husband insisted they host,

but Ciro came early, with his suspenders stretched tight over his shirt and a magnum of champagne that we put outside to chill on the balcony, only he left again just after ten, the bottle’s still on the floor in the hall, but before he went I sat down with him on the sofa for a bit, Ciro with his big belly, he asked me to, Come here, he said, and patted the cushion beside him, he was the one I knew best out of everyone there, and he told me about the two women he was seeing, coincidentally they had the same name, which was practical, he said, and we laughed, and then he lowered his voice to a whisper and said it’s hard for the one who’s ill, but much worse in a way for the one who isn’t, and that’s when I teared up, I don’t care who it’s worse for, it’s just so seldom anyone ever talks to me or asks how I am, and when everyone arrived at half past eight I sat down on a stool in the kitchen with a huge gin and tonic and my phone and wouldn’t speak to anyone, I was ill, and they could tell from my voice that I was, but mostly I was angry, or else I was so angry it made me ill, for not saying I was angry, but anyway I sat there for a whole hour on my own.

Ørstavik’s most recent novel, Stay with Me, opens two years after the death of the narrator’s publisher husband, L, to an unspecified illness. She’s a Norwegian writer living in Milan, in the apartment she once shared with L. For the past year she’s been seeing M, a man seventeen years her junior, whom she met when he came to fix her toilet. He’s from a world outside her own, and it’s a difference she finds appealing. She’s drawn to his ‘warmth’ and ‘tenderness’, and although she describes some of his romantic gestures – the candlelit piano concert he takes her to, the white rose he fashions from a serviette and hangs from the door – we mostly have to take her word for it. M still lives with his ex, relies on his mother to buy his clothes and iron his shirts, disappears for days without calling or texting and ‘kicks his dog, not hard, but rather often’. Before long, he reveals his caratteraccio, his bad temper. Small irritations set him off. On one occasion, he berates the narrator for asking if he’s coming to bed. ‘Surely it’s possible for him to just sit there on his own after a long day,’ she recalls him saying, ‘as if he’s in a trance of some kind’. He gets especially angry when she drinks in the evening – a habit she formed to blunt her loneliness after her husband’s death. Yet she clings to the idea that M’s ‘softness will come out stronger, it’s the softness that’s most important, truest.’

The narrator of Stay with Me doesn’t offer many details about L or their marriage, but the husband in Ti Amo is attentive and gentle, and the contrast with M makes the new romance more puzzling. But Stay with Me is less a report on what happened – the ups and downs of a tumultuous relationship – than an examination of why the narrator finds it difficult to leave her new partner. It’s partly what she experiences in his presence. ‘When … we’re together, I feel so alive. Every moment, no matter if it hurts, no matter if it’s terrible, is so intense.’ Feeling alive offers something like respite to a person whose last few years were spent anticipating death and then grieving. But another explanation interests her more. When she was growing up, her father would be driven mad by transgressions as slight as doodling on the notepad by the phone, or accidentally knocking over a glass. ‘I can’t remember how it would happen, that Pappa would get angry. It just did.’ Her mother bore the worst of it: late at night, after the narrator went to bed, she would hear the sounds of slaps, punches, kicks. The fear she experiences with M is familiar. ‘Is fear a bond?’ she asks.

Meanwhile, she is struggling to write a novel. Her images are ‘still’ and ‘unmoving’; the protagonist, a Norwegian costume designer called Judith, is ‘suspended’. Judith is the same age as the narrator, recently widowed, and her deceased husband, Myrto, was Italian. They had moved from Milan to Saint Paul, Minnesota, where Myrto had taken a conducting job, but he died unexpectedly soon after they arrived. In Saint Paul, Judith, still grieving, meets the much younger Matt. They begin an affair, but unlike the narrator’s romance with M, the relationship is pleasant and unthreatening – at least from Judith’s perspective. (Matt is ‘seventeen, eighteen maybe’, and if Judith ever worries about having sex with a teenage boy the narrator doesn’t say so.) Here Judith’s affair is less central than her experience of grief, making it the inverse of the frame story, where the narrator says almost nothing of what it felt like to lose L, or how she managed after his death. Through Judith we see how profoundly the narrator has been unmoored by bereavement, now that ‘there are no eyes any more that see her as he saw her.’

Eyes have tremendous power in Ørstavik’s work. In The Pastor, Liv falls to the floor weeping; it was her housemate’s eyes, ‘the way she looked at me, that had taken me there’. Elsewhere being seen provides a sense of belonging. ‘I feel as if I’ve come home when I look into your eyes,’ the narrator in Ti Amo says of her husband. Once he starts taking morphine, his eyes ‘aren’t the same any more, the look in them isn’t the same, the place I found in them is gone in a way.’ In Stay with Me eyes have become a fixation. Matt’s contain ‘softness’ and Judith’s ‘something peculiarly soft and at the same time something gleaming’. The narrator’s childhood friend Jørgen holds in his eyes a ‘tunnel’ that leads to a ‘place of light’, whereas the eyes of a boy in a photograph by Sally Mann are ‘blocked out by a wall, I can’t see into them.’ And then there is M, in whose eyes the narrator sees a ‘warmth that’s there so strongly in them sometimes, but then becomes hard and excluding’. The novel is concerned with the ways we see people and are seen by them, and with how consequential it is to feel that some hidden part of us has been recognised by another. ‘Do we see something in the other person, and does the other person (seen, found!) then want us to take care of what we see?’ But the repetition risks becoming mechanical – M’s eyes also contain ‘softness’, Pappa’s eyes also contain ‘light’ – and occasionally limp. ‘It’s as if those eyes’, the narrator says of M, ‘have seen all the world’s pain, every kind of sorrow, as if they feel everything that hurts.’

Ørstavik is disinclined to signal a shift in point of view or location or time; or rather, she’s interested in what happens when you do away with these transitions. In Love, she switches between mother and boy, sometimes from sentence to sentence, and it’s only context that orients the reader. The way the two perspectives scrape against each other only accentuates the distance between them. In The Blue Room, Johanne’s credibility is steadily eroded as her narration slips between scenes from her bedroom, her recollections of her mother and her new boyfriend, and her erotic, sometimes violent fantasies; the separation between what’s real and what isn’t breaks down. In Stay with Me, the frame story, about M, and the interior story, about Judith, are interwoven so that it’s not always easy to distinguish between the two. Segments of Judith’s story are interrupted by the narrator writing in the first person; we’re reading reflections on the novel, not the novel itself.

Adding another layer of complexity, Ørstavik – or a voice representing the author – sometimes interjects with observations of her own. (‘Perhaps Judith’s a clearer picture of me in the novel than the first-person narrator is.’) Are there three women in these nested narratives – a grieving woman writing about a grieving woman writing about a grieving woman – or one refracted as many? ‘Are we put together from multiple parts, where some of those parts are rudimentary and primitive and small, while others are bigger, older, more grown-up, competent and responsible? Do all those parts rattle around in us, and who if anyone knows how they fit together?’

In her earlier novels, Ørstavik’s strength was in depicting how love is never simply ‘something warm and safe’, as the narrator of Stay with Me puts it. Beneath the surface of her taut, precise sentences were pain, fear, violence. Stay with Me takes a different approach. Here, as in Ti Amo, the voice is distressed and vulnerable, the sentences winding and riddled with commas. According to Martin Aitken, who has sensitively translated four of her books, Ørstavik describes the prose in the new novel as ‘precarious’. The narrator is afraid to slow down; she isn’t bothered about ‘well-formed syntax, conventions of punctuation or elegance of vocabulary’. She may not always understand her emotions, but she is direct about them: ‘Have I always been afraid? Was fear transferred to me when I was in the womb … ? Mamma was always afraid. And me?’ Real and fictional examples of violent or dark relationships – Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio, Edward and Bella from Twilight – are scrutinised for clues. The relentless self-examination isn’t always subtle. Not long after we learn that both Pappa and M were beaten as children – Pappa by his mother, M by his stepfather – the narrator recalls a question from a university philosophy class: ‘How do we know who’s going to turn out to be violent?’ Her answer: ‘If you were a victim of violence yourself.’

There’s a third thread in Stay with Me, focused on the narrator’s present-day relationship with her father, who has become softer in old age. It’s here, in depicting their tentative conversations and the father’s muddle of denial and pain, that Ørstavik excels. Pappa defends the canings he suffered as a child: ‘Mother was fair.’ And he responds callously when the narrator empathises with her own mother, who, decades after the divorce, remains scarred by the marriage. ‘Poor Mamma?’ he asks incredulously. ‘Poor me, you mean.’ But he’s not entirely unreflective. As the narrator’s relationship with M deteriorates, her father sees what she can’t: her efforts to villainise M’s stepfather, and to compel M to face his past, are alienating him. M is ‘bound up in having been beaten’, Pappa says. The terrified child in him needs someone ‘to be in that place with him’, not to ‘look on it with clever thoughts and a lot of talk’. Pappa’s advice allows the narrator to find resolution in her relationship with M, but only after she acknowledges something her father can’t: the frightened child who most needs her attention lives not in M but in her. Her duty lies with that ‘soft and watchful little girl’.