In noting my objection (see post immediately below) to Pat Conroy's kind of overwrought storytelling, I mentioned my preference for a style of fiction that is more spare. What I had in mind is Paul Harding's Tinkers or Per Petterson's best-selling novel of a couple years ago, Out Stealing Horses.
Well, Graywolf Press has just released an English translation (by Charlotte Barslund) of Per Petterson's latest novel, I Curse the River of Time, which is a big prize winner in his native Norway and has sold hundreds of thousands of copies there. I settled in to read it with the high expectation that it would deliver the same moving experience as 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. (More below, after the jump.)
Petterson is a fine writer and a brilliant, compassionate observer. 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.
It was not what I had expected. He was the only patient there, and he was on a ventilator. He was lost, I could see that right away, it was not him breathing it was this machine that pushed air into his lungs in a way no human being had ever breathed, and there were sounds coming from the machine, scary mechanical, hissing noises. The machine looked evil, it was hurting him, it was beating his body, and he could not defend himself, could not stop the hammering, for he was lost. . . . Big chunks of life had been lost when I entered the room in Ullevål Hospital and saw him lying in the ventilator, fettered and chained like a naked cosmonaut all alone in his cockpit, launched and alone on his way to some small maybe warmer place in the cold universe, if such a place existed, which sadly I did not believe, but 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 a chair by the window my father was sitting with something like a smile on his lips, an inappropriate smile, in that case, and he stared out of the window and across the buildings which made up Ullevål Hospital and further on to Ullevål Hageby where the houses looked impeccably English and a tiny bit snobbish, and perhaps he could see all the way to Ullevål Stadium from where he was sitting.
When he turned from the window and looked across the room, he could see me where I stood two paces into the room, and 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. When the main character talks to his mother about her fear of dying, he thinks that he, too, is scared.
. . . Not of being dead, that I could not comprehend, to be nothing was impossible to grasp and therefore really nothing to be scared of, but the dying itself I could comprehend, 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 this is a case of a character-driven novel that needs a little more ooomph to push it along.
UPDATE (August 12): Reviewers in today's Boston Globe and New York Times have their say.
Sense and Nonsense 