Write about love

The Norwegian novelist Hanne Ørstavik is fairly explicit about the fact that her chief subject is love. Her first novel to be translated into English bore the title Love (2019; Kjærlighet, 1997), and she has suggested that the narrative of that book unspooled from the question “What is love?”, which she was asking herself anew in the light of her daughter’s recent birth. Ti Amo (2022) was named for the phrase the narrator and her Italian husband, a publisher, would say to one another all the time. In intimate, unflinching detail, the narrator reproduces her experience of caring for him while he is dying of cancer in Milan. It took Ørstavik ten days to write, constructing the fictionalized second-person addressee husband on the page in the breaks between caring for her real-life partner.

Writers love their protagonists into existence. I think that’s right. At the start they may be no more than a face glimpsed through a smeary window, but the face shows promise, so the writer comes nearer, attending to its features, then to the mind working behind it. The protagonist of Stay with Me, Ørstavik’s latest novel (translated by Martin Aitken, his fourth time translating her work) came to the narrator-writer just before her husband’s death. She began, we learn, as a solitary image: of a woman kneeling on a long, floating jetty, staring down into the water. Her name is Judith, but for a long time no further details about her life materialize. Eventually the narrator discovers that Judith has a husband, Myrto, a classical conductor who has recently died; before his death they moved from Milan to Minneapolis. Though the narrator has visited Minneapolis just once, she knows instantly it “has a novel for me”.

At first this metafictional approach reminded me of Mia Hansen Løve’s film Bergman Island (2021), in which the protagonist’s idea for a film becomes a film nested inside the one we are watching. In Stay with Me, however, the narrator soon deviates from Judith’s story, becoming more preoccupied with describing events from her own life, particularly the experience of falling in love again for the first time since her husband’s death. The new man, “M”, is another Italian, seventeen years her junior. M and the narrator go out for dinner, on holiday; they take drugs together. But mostly they fall out. It is hard going as a reading experience: though M treats her terribly, the narrator keeps coming back for more.

Ørstavik’s theme in these more autofictional sections is love’s relationship to violence. The narrator’s paternal grandmother would hit her father as a child. The narrator’s father once threatened her mother with an axe (while she was pregnant with the narrator). And now the narrator loves a man who threatens her with violence. Ørstavik drops across the novel a series of hanging questions: “Isn’t love supposed to be something good, something warm and safe?”; “Is fear a bond?” But these merely weigh the narrative down – as do the seemingly arbitrary examples of couples from history whose love affairs were laced with violence, such as Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio.

The problem with Stay with Me is that it feels like a preparatory sketch. At one point the narrator imagines that she might return to Minneapolis for further research. But she never does, and Judith’s lived world remains a faint, uncertain shape, lost under all the other material. Often Ørstavik returns to that first image, as if she cannot work out where Judith is going, so instead winds the tape back.

On the bridge, as she looks down into the river’s rushing water, its movement does not tug at her the way it did for me when I was nine or twelve or sixteen and longing to be away. There’s a point below that, which is where Judith is now. In the water, underneath it all, she lies on her back. She sees herself lying there, her eyes are open, but she doesn’t know what she sees.

The prose is rushed and unclear, the suture between Judith and the narrator clumsily stitched. Where is Judith, knelt or lying on her back? Can she see herself lying there, or does she not know what she sees?

In an interview in 2022, Aitken reflected on the experience of translating Hanne Ørstavik. He suggested that Love “stuck out” because “the sentences are somehow firmer and more precise”. Stay with Me is so far from Love, a novel marked by the elegant assurance of its structure and style, its care and attentiveness. To fail at entering into the lives of your characters, or the places in which you choose to situate them, doesn’t sound like love to me; it sounds like passing infatuation.

Lamorna Ash is the author of Dark, Salt, Clear: Life in a Cornish fishing town, 2020. Her second book, Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever, on the contemporary landscape of Christianity in Britain, will be published in May

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