Per Petterson
publisher
Graywolf Press
format
Hardcover
pages
224
Frank Delaney
The Flight of Gemma Hardy
Margot Livesey
American Dervish
Ayad Akhtar
Time and Again
Jack Finney
In Norway, 1989, Communism is unraveling all over Europe. In Per Petterson's new novel, I CURSE THE RIVER OF TIME, Arvid Jansen, thirty-seven, is trying to bridge the yawning gulf that opened up years earlier between himself and his mother. He is in the throes of a divorce, and she has just been diagnosed with cancer. Over a few intense autumn days, Arvid struggles to find a new footing in his life. As he attempts to negotiate the present changes around him, he casts his mind back to holidays on the beach with his brothers and to the early days of his courtship. Most importantly, he revisits the idealism of his communist youth when he chose the factory floor over the college education his mother had struggled so hard to provide. Back then, Arvid's loyalty to his working class background outweighed his mother's wish for him to escape it. In its piercing portrayal of their layered relationship, I CURSE THE RIVER OF TIME bears all the hallmarks of Petterson's compassion for humanity that has won him the adoration of readers world-wide.
About the Author
Per Petterson (born 1952) worked for several years as an unskilled labourer, trained as a librarian, and worked as a bookseller, writer, and translator before publishing his first work, Aske i munnen, sand i skoa (Ash In His Mouth, Sand In His Shoe), a volume of short stories, in 1987. This book was proclaimed one of the decade’s most sensational debuts. Since then he has written a book of essays and five novels that have established his reputation as one of Norway’s most significant fiction writers. These are Ekkoland (1989), Det er greit for meg (1992), To Siberia (1996), In the Wake (2000) and Out Stealing Horses (2003). For To Siberia, Petterson was nominated for the Nordic Council’s Literary Award and nominated for The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. For In the Wake he received the prestigious Norwegian literary prize, Brageprisen, and the novel was longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Out Stealing Horses was awarded the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in the UK, as well as both the Norwegian Booksellers’ Prize and the Norwegian Critics’ Award for best novel. In 2006, the novel was also named one of the 25 best Norwegian books the last 25 years by the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet. Out Stealing Horses has sold more than 140,000 copies in its different editions in Norway, and was on the Norwegian bestseller list for more than 70 weeks
Beyond the book
'I Curse The River Of Time' Flows Effortlessly
by HELLER MCALPIN
Per Petterson, an avid reader and bookseller before he became a writer, provides one of literature's greatest gifts in his novels - an absorbing interiority that creates a welcome refuge from our cacophonous world. His books are suffused with a luxurious, downy silence, a quiet that allows us to slow down and sink into spare language that evokes complex emotions and primal sensations such as cold, wet, darkness and light with surprising force.
In Out Stealing Horses, Petterson's gorgeous, heartbreaking novel about a father-son relationship disrupted by war and romance, his main character, a 67-year-old widower who retires to a remote cabin with no forwarding address, recalls the last summer he spent in a similar riverside cabin near the Norway-Sweden border with his father in 1948, 52 years earlier. Deep in his musings and memories, he worries about becoming a "shipwrecked man without an anchor in the world except in his own liquid thoughts where time has lost its sequence."
Time does lose its sequence in the liquid thoughts of the narrator of Petterson's melancholic, misty, somewhat autobiographical new novel, I Curse the River of Time. Arvid Jansen reflects back on his life, and especially 1989, a difficult year for him when, at 37, he was set adrift by the impending loss of his three anchors - his marriage, his mother, and Communism.
A prequel to In the Wake (2006), Petterson's book takes its title from a line in a poem by Mao, one of his narrator's heroes. Arvid, like Petterson, is the son of factory workers; his intellectual, multi-lingual, Danish-born mother worked at the Freia chocolate factory before leaving to clean hotels and public buildings. To his mother's disgust, in his fervor for communism, Arvid quits college after two years to join the proletariat, which he comes to realize "actually didn't exist anymore, but was an anachronism" - "not quite the same as the [working class] my mother and father belonged to on a daily basis."
It slowly dawns on Arvid that his parents had no choice, whereas he's made a bad one. A lifelong reader like his mother, his memories of "a childhood whirled away by time" and a beautiful, fine courtship sadly "ground into dust" are interspersed with resonant reactions to various classics, including Les Miserables and A Moveable Feast.
I Curse the River of Time is about "a man out of time" who feels betrayed by what life has handed him when he wasn't watching, as if "Time had passed behind my back and I had not turned to look ... ." Both time and Petterson's narrative are more tidal than linear, flowing forward and backward in associative waves that require close attention and do not offer the dramatic drive of Out Stealing Horses. But the relationship that emerges here between a grown man and his fatally ill mother, whose support and attention he can't stop seeking even when he realizes he should be sustaining her, is complex and rich. Petterson has delivered a subtle meditation on the long, unstoppable river of time that pulls us all along relentlessly, whether we pay attention or not.