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Summary
Summary
An enthralling novel of a mother and son's turbulent relationship from the author of Out Stealing Horses
Norway, 1989: Communism is unraveling all over Europe. 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.
As Petterson's masterful narrative shifts effortlessly through the years, we see Arvid tentatively circling his mother, unable to tell her what she already knows he is thinking. In its piercing portrait of their layered relationship, I Curse the River of Time bears all the hallmarks of Petterson's compassion for humanity that has won him readers the world over.
Author Notes
Per Petterson was born in Norway on July 18, 1952. He is a trained librarian and before becoming a full-time writer, he worked as a bookstore clerk, translator and literary critic. His first work, Aske i munnen, sand i skoa (Ash in His Mouth, Sand in His Shoe), a volume of short stories, was published in 1987. His other works include These are Ekkoland (1989), Det er greit for meg (1992), and To Siberia (1996). He has won numerous awards including the prestigious Norwegian literary prize Brageprisen for In the Wake (2000) and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in the UK, the Norwegian Booksellers' Prize, and the Norwegian Critics' Award for best novel for Out Stealing Horses (2003).
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Like an emotional sucker punch, the latest novel from the much-acclaimed Petterson (a prequel to 2006's In the Wake) examines lives half-lived, ending, and perhaps beginning anew. In 1989, 37-year-old Arvid Jansen's marriage is ending and his mother is dying of cancer. Hoping to leave his marital woes behind in Oslo, Jansen follows his Danish-born mother to her home country, to the beach house where the family spent summers. During the ferry ride and the following days in Denmark, Jansen recalls his childhood bond with his mother and his decision, after two years of college, to leave school and join his fellow Communists in the factories. He struggles with his commitment to communism-the title is a line from a poem by Mao-and with his place in his family and in the larger world. Thankfully, there is neither overt sentimentalism nor a deathbed declaration of love between mother and son, but Petterson blends enough hope with the gorgeously evoked melancholy to come up with a heartbreaking and cautiously optimistic work. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Europe 1989. As communism crumbles, 37-year-old Norwegian Arvid Jansen's life is falling apart. He's getting a divorce, and his mother is dying of cancer. She's traveled to her native Denmark, where she plans to live out her days. Though mother and son shared a passion for books, they were never close, and Arvid follows her there in one last attempt to connect. This is also the land of his childhood, and every place he goes triggers memories. He indulges recollections of past loves, beach vacations with his brothers, and time spent as a young Communist working in a factory. (He dropped out of college, much to his mother's chagrin.) Norwegian novelist Petterson (Out Stealing Horses, 2007) deftly alternates between present and past, as Arvid searches for purpose in his life. There are autobiographical elements at work here; Petterson's own mother was a voracious reader who considered him intellectually lazy because he didn't speak German. Petterson's plot is a bit sluggish, but his prose is eloquent and spare. A bleak but involving novel that will appeal to readers of character-driven literary fiction.--Block, Allison Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
"I HAD no name, no home in time," thinks Arvid Jansen, the narrator of Per Petterson's slender, subtly incisive new novel, "I Curse the River of Time." It's a statement that could apply to most of Petterson's lonely Scandinavian souls. In his books - the best known is probably "Out Stealing Horses" - Petterson depicts a literal and figurative geography that, to American readers, might feel a little like the starker reaches of the West, a little like the stonier shores of Maine, a little like Edward Hopper, a little like Raymond Carver. His characters are decent, laconic and perpetually, possibly existentially, chilled. They just can't get warm, can't stay warm, no matter how hard they try. At the risk of perpetrating a geographical cliché, I have to say that Petterson's world feels Far Northern to the core - windswept, dimly lit, its summers and romances hard-won, deeply felt, reluctantly left behind. Memory, in this unregenerate landscape, is often the only thing these people have to get them through the winter of their discontents. They hoard it, hide it, keep it close at all times. Petterson's narratives tend to unspool in the first person, in hushed, confidential tones. Tight-lipped with one another, his characters open their hearts to the reader, making us witnesses to their most private selves. He makes the reader lean in, out of the wind, to listen closely. In "I Curse the River of Time," set in 1989, three monumental events twine around one another in Arvid Jansen's penumbra! soul. His 15-year marriage is dissolving, his mother is dying of cancer and the Berlin Wall is tumbling down. The parallels are obvious - worlds are ending, internally and externally - but the analogies Petterson draws among these dramatic endings are not. Instead of describing the crash and slam of destruction, Petterson locates and threads his story along the meridian of suspension between one life, one world, and another. His tale lives in the liminal, nauseating space where you don't know who you are anymore or what will become of you. Arvid, like many of Petterson's narrators, is much more astronaut than cowboy, an emotional rocket man floating through a life he no longer understands, searching the past for clues. It sounds bleak, but instead it's rather dreamy and tenuous, like the thoughts one has in the brief moment between sleeping and waking. Clean sentence after clean sentence, Petterson conveys both the melancholy and the demi-pleasurable sensation of being fundamentally untethered. Petterson's canny use of narrative leverage is one of the ways he achieves this quality. All of these vast changes - divorce, death, geopolitical upheaval - take place offstage. We know them through the shadows they throw onto much smaller interactions and events. The novel, which loops and backtracks through time, occupies a few days in Arvid's life. On the threshold of his divorce, he accompanies his mother from Norway, where she has lived most of her adult life, to her tiny hometown in northern Denmark. He remembers the early days with his wife, his youth as a member of the Communist Party and the factory work he did as proof of that belief, scenes from his childhood. He walks here and there, rides his bicycle, takes the subway around Oslo. Other parts of Scandinavia are treated as distant, possibly hostile planets (Arvid drops snarky remarks about Danes and Swedes). A stranger on the street in Denmark knows from Arvid's blue bicycle that he "was not Danish, for all Danish bicycles are black." More than one scene takes place on a rickety ferry called the Holger Danske, a suspiciously foreign, notoriously unreliable vehicle of this journey across the River Styx to the past. Now and then, Arvid dips into his mother's point of view without fanfare, as casually as if he were glancing into a mirror on his way out the door. Petterson has the ability to be simultaneously restrained and terribly tender; the touches may be few, but each one counts. Of his impending divorce, Arvid writes, "But something had happened, nothing hung together anymore, all things had spaces, had distances between them, like satellites, attracted to and pushed away at the same instant, and it would take immense willpower to cross those spaces, those distances, much more than I had available, much more than I had the courage to use." This description of freefall, of spiritual failure, applies equally well, of course, to his mother's imminent death and to the collapse of a former global superpower. Things fall apart, and suddenly time and space change as well, stretch out unpredictably. "I was searching for something very important, a very special thing, but no matter how hard I tried, I could not find it," Arvid mourns, his sense of loss both vague and endless, his survival both a surprise and something of a disappointment. "I am 37 years old. . . . The Wall has fallen. And here I sit." Deprived at the same moment of the love of his wife, who is leaving him, and of his mother, who has always seemed to prefer her other sons, Arvid feels himself to be an invisible man. (The father exits in the first few pages and isn't much of a force here.) Of his mother, he asks, "Was the shadow I cast not long enough, not substantial enough, for her?" And, elsewhere, he says flatly: "She did not pay attention, she turned her gaze to other things. She saw me come in and didn't know where I had been, she saw me go out and didn't know where I was heading, how adrift I was, how 16 I was without her, how 17, how 18." How does one mourn a person whose love one has never really had? Petterson doesn't attempt to answer this question. Instead, he describes with piercing simplicity what it feels like: utter erasure, being nameless and timeless, unheard. At least when the Wall fell, people noticed. It made a noise. Petterson, humbly and with extraordinary skill, makes standing on the edge of that soundless personal abyss seem heroic. Over and over, his characters don't fight with it, stare it down, plunge into it, dance frantically on its crumbling lip; mostly, they don't talk about it much. And yet it is always there, just beneath the surface of everything, common as gravity, cold as outer space. They bear it. There is a quality that I can only call charm, or something like charm, to Petterson's essentially dark and lonely sensibility. Arvid isn't anyone special. He's just a divorced guy with a withholding, dying mom living through a turning point in history that he didn't choose and doesn't control. Neither the favorite son nor the black sheep, he's the middle child of the universe, constantly overlooked. And yet he exerts his own gravitational pull on the reader by maintaining his balance in the loveless aporia where he has unexpectedly found himself. It may not seem like much, but, really, it's quite a lot. Petterson describes what it feels like to mourn a person whose love one has never really had. Stacey D'Erasmo's most recent novel is "The Sky Below."
Library Journal Review
At 37, Arvid Jansen sees his world falling apart. His divorce is imminent, the Cold War is over, and the life choices he made to burnish his credibility with the Communist Party now seem sadly irrelevant. Eschewing the college education his parents toiled so hard to provide him, Arvid chose shift work in a factory, a decision that caused a rift with his mother, all the more untenable now that she's been diagnosed with cancer. Crippled by grief, guilt, and an unlovely excess of self-pity, Arvid tries to come to grips with the present by reexamining the past, in particular the effect of his younger brother's death on the family dynamic. VERDICT The atmosphere of this latest from Petterson, famed for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award winner Out Stealing Horses, is as gray as the stark Norwegian landscape. Melancholy permeates every character like a dense Oslo fog. Yet, this author's gift is his ability to convey so much emotion in such a spare prose style. Petterson's reputation and the litany of prizes awarded to this work after its release in Europe last year make it essential for all literary collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 3/15/10.]-Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Ft. Myers, FL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.