"I love you. We say it to each other all the time. We say it instead of saying something else. What would that something else be? You: I’m dying. Us: Don’t leave me. Me: I don’t know what to do. Before: I don’t know what I’ll do without you. When you’re not here any more. Now: I don’t know what to do with these days, all this time, in which death is the most obvious of all things. I love you. You say it in the night when you wake up in pain, or between dreams, and reach out for me. I say it to you when my hand finds your skull, which has become small and round in my palm now that your hair is almost gone, or when I stroke you gently to get you to turn over and stop snoring. I love you. 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 small and without language, something perhaps undeveloped in me, a newborn 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, and reach out for me from the bed on which you lie through the days, fully dressed, writing on your phone, writing a novel on that little screen, two or three lines at a time before you drift into sleep again, and I let go of the door frame and step towards you and take your hand and look at you and say: I love you too."
Watch Norwegian writer Hanne Ørstavik's lecture from the Sozopol Seminar 2023, where we explore the theme of loss and grief in literature.
The short-prose novel "Cut" (1994) was Hanne Ørstavik's first publication, and from then she has become one of the most remarkable and admired authors in Norwegian contemporary literature.
Her literary breakthrough came three years later with the publication of "Love" which in 2006 was voted the 6th best Norwegian book of the last 25 years in a prestigious contest in Dagbladet. Since then the author has written several acclaimed and much discussed novels and received a host of literary prizes. Her novel "The Pastor" won the Brage Prize in 2004, and she was nominated for the Brage Prize again in 2013 for "On the Terrace in the Dark". In 2018 "Love" was published for the first time in English, earning rave reviews in US papers. The book was a finalist for the National Book Award the same year, and the translation won the PEN Translation Prize early 2019. Ørstavik’s work has been translated into more than 35 languages. "Ti Amo", a harrowing autobiographical account of a woman whose husband is suffering terminal cancer, is her fifteenth novel.
The Sozopol Seminars (2023) of the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation were made possible with the financial support of the Restoration and Development of Private Cultural Organizations Program of the National Culture Fund, the Lois Roth Foundation, the University of Michigan, NORLA and Dragoshinov Winery. We also extend our appreciation to the Art Gallery at the Municipal Cultural Institute “Museum Center” - Sozopol and the Municipality of Sozopol for their invaluable support.
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