While Norwegian music is not totally unfamiliar to me (a-ha from the 80s and more recently, Secret Garden), I confess to not having read many Norwegian authors other than Henrick Ibsen, so its good to find a contemporary and reasonably-acclaimed Norwegian writer.
To Siberia was written in 1996 and won the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize. It was translated into English by Anne Born and has recently been republished by Vintage Books, making a nice set of three together with In The Wake, and Peterson’s most recent book, Out Stealing Horses (which has an incredibly gloomy synopsis provided by the publishers on their website).
To Siberia certainly lives up to its reputation of being, er, er . . . Scandinavian. Set in the cold land of Danish Jutland, where the sea freezes over and even the next town of Skagen is “nothing but sand”.
The story is narrated by an un-named young girl. The nearest we get to a name is when her brother addresses her as Sistermine. I think there should be a rule that writers should name their characters, for how can we poor reviewers refer to them other than by annoying descriptive titles such as the one I use, “the narrator”. The family are incredibly poor. The father works as a carpenter but is an inept businessman who charges minimal amounts for his work, while the mother is a deeply religious writer of hymns but refuses to publish them or even to sing them in public.
Continue reading Review: To Siberia – Per Petterson
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I’ve been enrolled in the Amazon Vine programme which enables me to select books and other items which have been donated by publishers as review copies.
The first book arrived this week and made me realise that perhaps part of the purpose of Vine from the publishers perspective is to try to beef up the sales of something obscure, peculiar, or down-right unmarketable. Forgive me Portobello Books if I’ve misinterpreted your motives!
I wouldn’t normally waste time reviewing a book like this but I am posting it here just in case some innocent Googler is tempted to waste a day or two flicking through this book before discarding it (ouch!).
I didn’t know what to make of this Norwegian book, A Time for Every Purpose Under Heaven. Its describe on the inside cover as a novel, but huge chunks of it are a theological history of angels, quoting extensively (and I really mean extensively) from the Bible and the early Father’s of the Church, Jerome, Gregory, Aquinas etc. Much of the first part of the book is taken up with discussing whether angels existed before the creation of the earth or whether they were part of the creation, which all seemed a bit arcane to me – particularly as this reader at least, don’t really believe in angels anyway.
The fiction comes in at the start when Antonous Bellori, an 11 year old boy has a frightening encounter with two angels and then spends the rest of his life studying written accounts of angels in order to write the definitive angelic history, “On The Nature of Angels”.
Continue reading Review: A Time for Every Purpose Under Heaven
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