by admin on March 4, 2010
Per Petterson has written a number of great books, not only Out Stealing Horses. His international breakthrough, however, came with Out Stealing Horses. It is a great novel, and excellently translated as well. The English translation was perhaps even better than the original Norwegian text.
I Curse the River of Time, titled 
after a poem by Mao, has many of the same literary qualities. It tells a story of grief at lost opportunities in a melancholic, wise manner, full of quiet compassion and tenderness. It is written in much the same way – understated, a little distanced, and full of intriguing observations.
I Curse the River of Time has already received a number of prestigious awards and prizes. In Norway it won the 2008 Critics’ Prize and the 2008 Brage Prize. And in 2009 it won the Nordic Council’s Literary Prize. Deservedly so, in my opinion.
The book starts with the fall of Communism in Europe, in 1989. Arvid Jansen, a character who has also appeared in other of Per Petterson’s books – the first time in Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes – is now 37 years old. He is about to get divorced. At the same time, his mother is diagnosed with cancer. Arvid’s world is shaking in its foundations.
We follow Arvid as he struggles to find a new footing. It is not easy for him, as the changes occur in a seemingly furious pace. And as he attempts to negotiate and come to terms with the new present, his mind travel back and forth in time. There is much to reconcile. He remembers holidays on the beach with his brothers, courtship, and his early working life. He remembers when as a young Communist he abandoned his studies to work on a production line, and how his mother could not understand it.
Arvid’s relationship to his mother plays a prominent part in I Curse the River of Time, just as Trond’s relationship to his father was in focus in Out Stealing Horses. It is a complicated relationship. They love each other deeply and are very close. Yet time over and time again they reject one another, do the opposite of what the other expect and want. Act against their feelings. In a sense caught is a dialectic movement of opposites in a contradiction. And now his mother is dying, but is still every bit as independent as ever.
I Curse the River of Time is an honest, intelligent and very heartbreaking, yet also humorous portrayal of a complicated mother-son relationship. It is told in Petterson’s very enjoyable, artful and precise prose. Like Out Stealing Horses, this book too quietly grows on you while you read, and somehow takes a firm grip on you. It is a book that provides much food for thought and one that stayed with me for a long time. It flows smoothly down the river of time, in a very pleasing fashion!
Praise for Per Petterson:
“Rife with beautiful incantatory moments.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Petterson’s spare and deliberate prose has astonishing force.” —The New Yorker
“Reading a Petterson novel is like falling into a northern landscape painting—all shafts of light and clear palpable chill.” —Time
“Per Petterson’s novels are novels you wait for. Once again he has written a novel where the dark secrets of life are magically illuminated.” —Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Germany
“His best book so far. (…) I Curse the River of Time is the powerful story of a great sin of omission, so well made that it is even more captivating than other books by Petterson in German. (…) A wonderful, melancholic book” —Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany
“Petterson’s mother and son story, written in such a tender and accurate way, (…) is moving and agonizingly beautiful. … like any great piece of art, it shines in the dark like a distant and mysterious light.” —Die Welt, Germany
by admin on February 10, 2010
To Siberia is a beautifully written book about the life of a sixty year old Danish woman and her family. Per Petterson lets this woman – we don’t even learn
who she is, only that she is referred to as “Sistermine”, my sister – tell us about her life. She tells, or thinks, about her childhood in a Danish port town on the Jutland peninsula, about her grandfather, a farmer who hangs himself in a cowshed, and of the rest of her family – her mother who is a devout Christian, and her father. But most of the book focuses on memories of her older brother Jesper, to whom she had a close and special relationship – their joint memories as well as her longing for him.
Sistermine and Jesper do not get much love or affection from their mother and often silent father. They grow up together, sharing late night adventures and experiences. They grow to learn that “the world was far bigger than the town I lived in,” and they look forward to “my own great journey.” They dream and share dreams. Jesper yearns to move to the warm climate of Morocco while Sistermine has her sights set on Siberia.
However, the German occupation shatters the future they have drawn up for themselves. Jesper, who is interested in politics and has a leftist political orientation, gets involved in the German resistance movement in Denmark. Eventually he, as many other Danes and Norwegians during World War II, runs away from the Germans, to Sweden. Sistermine watches him depart in a boat.
After the war is over, she moves around in Scandinavia, seemingly looking for meaning in her life, and constantly longing for her older brother, who has gone to Morocco after the war. As he dreamed he would. But alone – without her! Sistermine will never see him again, and she never gets to see Siberia either.
Like Out Stealing Horses, To Siberia is a sparely, beautifully written and at times poetic book. Per Petterson is an excellent writer and a pleasure to read. The story is interesting and touching, and like a river, the tale sometimes moves slowly, sometimes leaps ahead. However, in my opinion, To Siberia is not quite as good as Out Stealing Horses (which was remarkable), but even so very good.
by admin on December 5, 2009
Trond Sander from Oslo, a sixty-seven-year-old man, has recently lost his wife and sister. It has changed him. “I lost interest in talking to people.” He moves up to his cabin, high up in the mountains. He wants some solitude. He wants to live a different life. To ponder his life; bring his thoughts in order. The place he has moved to facilitates this process – it is a place where he has been before and full of memories.
Out Stealing Horses is a very special book, by a talented, prize-winning Norwegian author. It won the 2006 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and it really is a book to cherish and remember. It was also listed as one of the top 10 fiction books of 2007 by The New York Review of Books.
It is a book that it is very easy to fall in love with. I had not expected to, but I did after just a few pages. I suddenly noticed I was smiling and even laughing while reading. I read passages out load.
Out Stealing Horses is gripping. 
Viewed from the outside the book is relatively straight forward. Trond lives alone with his dog, and spends his time repairing the house and other small practical tasks. “All my life I have wanted to be alone in a place like this. Even when life was at its finest, as it has often been”.
But things change for Trond. Meetings with the neighbor living in the cabin a little further down the road evoke difficult memories for Trond. Memories about his father, about the summer of 1948 when he was 15 years old, and about events taking place that summer which were hard to understand for a fifteen year old boy. From the moment Trond sees a strange figure coming out of the dark behind his home, the reader is immersed in a decades-deep story of searching and loss, and in the precise, irresistible prose of a master of fiction writing.We move with Trond, back and forth in time, and we relive those events with Trond. Then we see and feel the their implications, how they have shaped and now reshape the mature Trond 52 years later.
The story in Out Stealing Horses is good, excellently translated by Anne Born (Per Petterson has stated that he thinks the English translation may be better than the original in Norwegian!), and it is told with great skill and compassion.
But it wasn’t only the story that made me love Out Stealing Horses. It was actually mostly the language – that beautiful, slightly remote, and very dense, moderate and crisp language that Per Petterson has chosen for his story. A form perfect for making those things that happen in the book – small and large – stand out on their own accord. A style of language that delivers joyful, happy, sad, tragic as well as beautiful events and scenes to me in such a raw, unprocessed form that it makes me need and want to reflect and ponder their implications and interrelations, and more or less forces me to relate to what I read.
Lots of joy, lots of food for thought. Out Stealing Horses is highly recommended!
Praise:
“Petterson’s kinship with Knut Hamsun, which he has himself acknowledged, is palpable in Hamsun’s “Pan,” “Victoria” and even the lighthearted “Dreamers.” But nothing should suggest that his superb novel is so embedded in its sources as to be less than a gripping account of such originality as to expand the reader’s own experience of life. — Thomas McGuane, New York Times
“Read Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson. From the first terse sentences of this mesmerizing Norwegian novel about youth, memory, and, yes, horse stealing, you know you’re in the hands of a master storyteller.”–Newsweek
“Petterson’s spare and deliberate prose has astonishing force. . . . Loss is conveyed with all the intensity of a boy’s perception but acquires new resonance in the brooding consciousness of the older man.”–The New Yorker
“ .. interesting, staggering and mind-blowing observations, thoughts and reflections about life, being, and nothingness made by Trond” — ScandinavianBooks.com
by admin on November 30, 2009
Per Petterson lost his cousin, his brother, and his parents the fire on the passenger ferry “Scandinavian Star” on April 7th, 1990. 159 people were killed. In the Wake is a powerful novel, presumably to a large extent autobiographical, that deals with the problems involved in coming to grips with terrible and 
meaningless events like this one. The novel is excellently written and has won several literary prizes in Europe.
The novel charts interior landscape of a writer. He is Arvid Jansen, aged 43. He has been more or less unable recover after losing his parents and two younger brothers in a ferry accident six years earlier. Arvid should actually have been on the same trip. After the accident, his life has changed dramatically. His wife has divorced him. He is estranged from his two young daughters. He is more or less unable to write and he hardly speaks to anyone. He is afraid of ties to other people: “I do not know if I want family anymore. It is too risky.”
Per Petterson takes us into the mind of Arvid. Into its vast emptiness and the pain. We see him rambling through each day without purpose or direction. “I feel the sun on my neck, it is burning or something is burning, and maybe it is Sunday. I don’t remember. I see only my eyes in the glass and the books beyond, and I don’t know what day it is.”
One reason the loss feels so heavy, is Arvid’s unresolved relationship to his father. And much of Arvid’s pondering revolves around the character of his father. He is probably made into an ideal, and seems larger than life in Arvid’s recollections of him.
Over time Arvid develops relationships with two neighbors. One of them is a Kurdish man who knows only very little Norwegian. The other is an attractive woman, Mrs. Grinde, who lives across the road.
After an unsuccessful suicide attempt by his brother, Arvid begins to work his way out of his mourning state. He tries to reunite with his family. Small steps, but important ones.
The topic in the novel is relatively gloomy. And, indeed, so is the book. After all, it deals with grief. However, greief, like some other emotional responses, is a state of mind experienced by many of us. And In the Wake is also a book about the rays of hope, and a book that has more. At times it is humorous as well. As well, it is seemingly authentic – Arvid is a character who fought with his family while they were alive and now misses them terribly.
In the Wake is a sensitive book, skillfully translated by Born, which deals with problems of the soul in a fine and measured way. It is a deep character study that provides an insightful look at grief and that is very well worth reading, by one of Norway’s finest writers.
by admin on November 17, 2009
Background
Per Petterson was born in 1952. He was raised in a “strictly working-class” household in Oslo, with his father’s Swedish relatives on one side and Danes on the other. His father, whom he describes as “an athlete, looking like Tarzan”, worked in a shoe factory.
He worked for several years as an unskilled laborer, trained as a librarian, and worked as a bookseller, writer, and translator. From the age of eighteen, he always wanted to become a writer, but for many years didn’t dare to try because he was certain that he would fail. In his opinion, he lived a half-miserable life for a long time because of this.
Petterson has experienced, survived and moved beyond the tragedy of his family: Petterson’s father, mother, brother and nephew perished when a ferry caught fire on the overnight sailing from Oslo to Frederikshavn in northern Denmark (a total of 159 people lost their lives).
In an interview with Guardian, Per Petterson said that he remembered the last thing his mother said to him, in April 1990. She had just finished reading his first novel, Echoland, which had been published in Norway the previous year.
“She said: ‘Well, I hope the next one won’t be that childish.’ Which was a blow. And the next weekend she was dead.”
“I’ve thought a lot about what she said. I’ve tried to figure out what she meant. She was a little harsh, because she herself had survived so many things. She probably meant that I hadn’t been ambitious enough in that novel, that I should go further. OK, you want to be a writer – be a writer then! But she shouldn’t really have said that.”
Per Petterson and the world of books
While working as a bookseller for Tronsmo (a radical bookstore) in Oslo, he developed a relationship to literature. He read and conversed with customers, some of them very knowledgeable, about books. He likes James Kelman, Alice Munro and Charles Bukowski.
“When I went to City Lights in San Francisco, people in Norway asked me what it was like. I said: It’s a little like Tronsmo, only Tronsmo is better for American literature.”
His debut as a writer
He finally published his first book, Aske i munnen, sand i skoa (Ash In His Mouth, Sand In His Shoe) in 1987, at the age of 35 and 17 years after having first recognized that he wanted to become a writer.
This book was proclaimed one of the decade’s most sensational debuts in Norway. Since then he has written a book of essays and several novels that have established his reputation as one of Norway’s most significant fiction writers.
Per Petterson’s writing style
As readers we experience a writer who is sparse almost to the extreme with his words, but have a feeling that this is because the story he is telling is perhaps more important than the words, and that the writer is unwilling to let superfluous words enter the text and interfere in the telling of the story. However, his writing style is actually quite different: Per Petterson works as a “sentence-by-sentence writer”, groping in the dark towards an illumination that is withheld even from the author.
“When I started Out Stealing Horses, I had no idea that the war would be in that book. Then some friction crept in – an unease between the two fathers. And I thought to myself: what can that be? Well, this is the 1940s. It has to be something about the war. Shit. I’ll have to write about the war. Then I have to do research, and I hate research. Of course, now it seems that the war is essential to the story.”
by admin on November 14, 2009
Per Petterson (b 1952), a Norwegian writer, worked for several years as an unskilled labourer, a bookseller, a writer and a translator until he made his literary debut in 1987 with the short story collection Aske i munnen, sand i skoa. This collection of stories was widely acclaimed by critics.
Per Petterson
To Siberia (1996), a novel set in the Second World War, was published in English in 1998 and nominated for The Nordic Council’s Literature Prize. His novel I kjølvannet, (In the Wake – 2002), is a young man’s story about losing his family in the Scandinavian Star ferry disaster in 1990. It won the Brage Prize for 2000.
Then, in 2003, he made his literary breakthrough with the prize-winning novel Ut og stjæle hester (Out Stealing Horses). So far, this novel has been translated into 40 languages. Out Stealing Horses has received a large number of literary awards, both in Scandinavia and in the rest of the world. It was awarded two top literary prizes in Norway – the The Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature and the Booksellers’ Best Book of the Year Award.
The 2005 English translation, Out Stealing Horses, was awarded the 2006 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the 2007 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Also, New York Times Book Review named Out Stealing Horses one of the 10 best books of the year.
His novel Jeg forbanner tidens elv (I Curse the River of Time – 2008) won The Nordic Council’s Literature Prize for 2009, with an English translation in the works. (* means not translated into English)
Books:
- 2008 Jeg forbanner tidens elv I Curse the River of Time
- 2004 Månen over Porten The Moon Above the Gate*
- 2003 Ut og stjæle hester Out Stealing Horses
- 2000 I kjølvannet In the Wake
- 1996 Til Sibir To Siberia
- 1992 Det er greit for meg It’s Fine by Me*
- 1989 Ekkoland Echoland*
- 1987 Aske i munnen, sand i skoa Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes*
Prizes:
- Nordic Council’s Literary Prize 2009
- The Brage Prize 2000 & 2008
- Critics’ Prize 2003 & 2008
- International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2007
- One of the 5 Best Fiction Books of 2007, New York Times
- One of the 10 Best Fiction Books of 2007, Time Magazine
- A New York Library Book to Remember 2007
- Le Prix Mille Pages 2007
- Le Prix Litteraire Europeen Madeleine Zepter 2007
- The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2006
- Booksellers’ Prize 2003
Praise for Per Petterson:
Haunting, minimalist prose and expert pacing give this quiet story from Norway native Petterson (In the Wake, 2006, etc.) an undeniably authoritative presence. — Kirkus Reviews
I was completely taken with Out Stealing Horses from the very first page. I found it powerful yet so quietly done I could hear myself breathe and I finished with an exhalation of awe –Amy Tan
The novel’s incidents and lush but precise descriptions…are on a par with those of Cather, Steinbeck, Berry, and Hemingway, and its emotional force and flavor are equivalent to what those authors can deliver, too. — Booklist
Per Petterson’s books:
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