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41 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Superb writer, but the story needs more oomph, August 6, 2010
I'm a big fan of spare, economical fiction. So, when I heard that Graywolf Press had just released an English translation (by Charlotte Barslund) of Per Petterson's latest novel, I CURSE THE RIVER OF TIME, I settled in to read it with the high expectation that it would deliver the same moving experience as his best-selling novel OUT STEALING HORSES. No such luck. If spare and economical fiction is a good thing, there may be too much of a good thing, and I think I encountered it in this book. As I will note below, there is much in this novel that is wonderful, but too much of the remainder feels empty, like the bleak landscapes he describes.
Petterson's novel is a portrait of the layered relationship between a 37-year-old man and his mother; he is on the verge of divorce, she has just discovered that she has cancer. The story swings between the present and the past as it dissects the nature of their relationship, particularly the way he disappointed her by leaving college (and the life she believed it augured for him) to pursue industrial labor in solidarity with the communist movement that held him in its sway.
Petterson is a fine writer and a brilliant, compassionate observer. There is an incredibly moving passage where the main character, Arvid, remembers a scene at Ullevål Hospital, where one of his brothers was dying, hooked up to a ventilator. the main character, Arvid, Consider this, the main character's memory of events surrounding the death of one of his brothers. He walks into the brother's hospital room, and his parents are both there with his brother. He thinks: "... I could not recall a single thing we had shared. No confidences exchanged between us, not in recent years certainly, and not when we were children either. And that could not be right. It was all there if only I could concentrate hard enough, but inside my brain there was something inattentive, some slippery patch of Teflon, where things that came swirling in and struck it bounced off again and were gone, a fickleness of mind. I was not paying attention, things happened and were lost. Important things." In that same recollection, Arvid reflects on an "inappropriate smile" on the face of his father, who was also there in the hospital room. "... I suddenly realized that he was embarrassed, that the expression I could see on his face, in his eyes, his faint smile, was embarrassment, and this while his third son was lying there dying just a few metres from him, or perhaps was already dead. And I was like my father was, we looked like each other, we were made from the same mould, I had always heard, and just like him, I too was embarrassed. I did not know death so close up, death was a stranger, and it made me embarrassed. I did not want to stay. I had just come in, but now I wanted out. I had no idea what to say and neither did my father, and our eyes met across the room, and we looked away at once and it made me feel so resigned and bitter, almost."
To my mind, that is exquisite writing -- so taut, so moving, so real. There are other passages of this quality in the book. Near the very end, for example, Arvid talks to his mother about her fear of dying, and he knows that he, too, is scared, not of being dead but of the dying itself, "the very instant when you know that now comes what you have always feared, and you suddenly realise that every chance of being the person you really wanted to be, is gone fo ever, and the one you were, is the one those around you will remember."
In sum, there is much to be admired in this novel. Petterson is a sensitive and thoughtful observer of the human condition, and his characters feel so real because of the finger-on-pulse quality of his writing. But in my view, this is a case of a character-driven novel that needs a little more ooomph to push it along.
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17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"I'm not afraid of dying. But dammit I don't want to die now.", August 6, 2010
Arvid, the protagonist of this Norwegian novel, is fifty now, and he has witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall, the massacre at Tiananmen Square, and the demise of Communism, along with major changes in his own life and in the lives of his family members. This character novel opens in the middle of a swirl of Arvid's memories: time has flashed back to 1989, and Arvid is thirty-seven, at a major crossroads in his life, the details of which evolve slowly. Taking an oblique approach, author Per Petterson embeds Arvid's story within these memories, conveying them in language which twists and turns in upon itself while slowly moving forward in strong, musical cadences. Vibrant imagery, some of it symbolic, connects past, distant past, and present, as Arvid's story, propelled by his recollections of family relationships and his own life choices, evolves to show how he became the person he is.
As the novel begins, Arvid's mother has just discovered that she has a recurrence of cancer, and she has decided to take the ferry from Norway back to her "home," on Jutland. Arvid has had a testy relationship with his mother over the years and has not talked with her in a while, trying to avoid telling her that he and his wife are getting a divorce, but when he gets a message that his mother has left home, he, too, takes the ferry to Jutland to see her. During this time, he is inundated with memories, which come, seemingly at random, from different times in his life.
Throughout, however, Arvid returns to stories of his mother, who, though hard pressed for cash herself, still gave him money when he was in college, but who, when he decided to leave college and give up his chance to escape the kind of life she and her husband had been living, smacked him, hard, across his face. On his trip to Jutland, he sees constant change and sees that even the "permanence" of the local cemetery is impermanent: a grave marker is routinely vandalized. Homely details and intense descriptions of nature give weight and importance to Arvid's experiences and what they reveal of him.
Though Arvid is coolly reserved and often tamps down his feelings, the reader comes to know him, understanding his mixed feelings about his mother while also recognizing his need for her, accepting his distance from his father while regretting their lack of connection, accepting his decisions even when they seem to be wrong for him, and seeing the effects of change upon him at every stage of his life. Often ineffective in his actions, clumsy in expressing his inner feelings, especially in matters of love, and unable to give himself fully to others, Arvid lacks the stature of a "hero." It is in this very characteristic, however-his imperfect humanity-that he comes to life, becoming a character so real that even the author has said (in an inteview on PowellsBooks), "Sometimes I call him not my alterego but my stunt man." Mary Whipple
To Siberia: A Novel
Out Stealing Horses: A Novel
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8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"Build a stunning bridge from my heart to hers", August 22, 2010
Those who have read and were awed by Petterson's previous novel, "Out Stealing Horses," will find things to admire in "I Curse the River of Time." The two books have much in common, starting with a reflective male narrator who recalls, in a chronologically jumbled fashion, a handful of events that shaped his current moral and emotional condition. Both novels, at their most poignant, focus on the vicissitudes of the bonds between parent and child: a father and son in "Stealing Horses" and a mother and son in "River of Time." In both books the eldest character -- the retired 67-year-old narrator in "Stealing Horses; the narrator's dying mother in "River of Time" -- travels to a second home at water's edge to live out their days.
Yet beyond these similarities there are significant differences in setting and tone. There is also a stark contrast in the maturity of the two narrators. If you are a reader entirely new to Petterson, these differences may be important as you select the book most apt to please.
"Out Stealing Horses," with its spare, classic qualities, and its emphasis on the character-defining power of raw nature, is reminiscent of such American authors as Hemingway and Jack London. Petterson obviously admires their writing. The remote rural setting of "Stealing Horses," its cast of unaffected men and women who meet hardship with stoicism, and the fact that its narrator is looking back on events that occurred over half a century ago in the era of World War II, allow the story to take on aspects of myth, a feeling at times of Biblical tragedy. No similar elegiac glow illuminates "I Curse the River of Time." It is set in more recent decades, largely in an industrial and contemporary urban environment, leaving little room for myth. Yet "River of Time" is richer in its psychological probing of the central parent-child bond (In a 2007 interview Peterson said, "All I ever think about is families."). It is also a more interesting study of another recurring Petterson theme: how historical events (in this case, the fall of communism) interrupt the fates of men and women.
One reason why some readers are likely to prefer "Stealing Horses" to "River of Time" is the flawed character of the new novel's narrator. The elements behind 37-year-old Arvid's existential crisis -- his membership in the Communist Party has lost its meaning; his wife is asking for a divorce; his dying mother still considers him "too fragile" to survive in the world -- simply may not be interesting enough to sustain your attention or your sympathy for his plight. It is true that Trond, the 67-year-old narrator of "Stealing Horses," shares with Arvid a nostalgia for the self-centeredness of their childhood. But Trond has lived a full life beyond that station while Arvid is maundering through life, hopelessly fixed on the irrecoverable. Arvid whines, he daydreams (in youth "I had all the time in the world in a way I have never had since") and laments his present status "adrift in time and space." His childishness is unaltered -- even, shockingly, at book's end.
What redeems "River of Time" is Petterson's command of incident and prose. His prose is at once unflashy and gorgeous. There are many beautifully rendered episodes (each reviewer here on Amazon seems to have his or her favorite). One is the lyrically described November stay at a country cabin where Arvid and his then girl friend spent a cold afternoon rowing a boat through the thinly iced lake. The author's easeful way of pulling philosophical reflections from commonplace events is on display as well. When Arvid takes a friend's dog to the vet to be euthanized, his imagination breaks free: "What worried me was that no one had asked if the dog was really mine. It felt unsafe, ambiguous, anything could happen, to anyone, if the one it was happening to had a trusting heart."
If you decide to read "I Curse the River of Time" as your introduction to Petterson, please know that the gifts you receive from it will be more than matched if you experience, next, "Out Stealing Horses."
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