Norwegian writer Per Petterson writes in a sparse, restrained style which somehow mirrors the bleak Scandinavian towns and landscapes he describes in his novels.  In I Curse the River of Time, we meet Arvid Janse, a character who features in other Petterson novels, a tired man who has failed to fulfil his potential and [...]]]>

Norwegian writer Per Petterson writes in a sparse, restrained style which somehow mirrors the bleak Scandinavian towns and landscapes he describes in his novels.  In I Curse the River of Time, we meet Arvid Janse, a character who features in other Petterson novels, a tired man who has failed to fulfil his potential and has a propensity to cheap whisky and memories of better times.

Arvid is going through a divorce, and his mother is dying of stomach cancer.  We join the story with his mother leaving Oslo on a ferry to sail small town in Jutland where she grew up, and where the family have a beach house near a remote village.

Petterson plays tricks with his readers straight-away as we read Arvid’s detailed description of his mother’s voyage complete with her thoughts and actions, down to the way she twisted the top off a bottle of whisky and filled her glass half-full – actions which her son, the first person narrator could not possibly have seen.  However, it all creates atmosphere: the cold sea and the bleak landscape of North Jutland with it marram grass, pine trees and sea-mist.

We then find ourselves in a car with Arvid and his two young daughters.  They are going for an aimless drive, one of many which they call “field-watching”.  Far from asking “Are we nearly there yet?”, the girls seem to enjoy their travels through the gloomy landscape, singing Beatles songs as they speed across bare fields and over treeless hills.

And then the early dark descended and there was nothing more to see. Inside the car it grew dark around our shoulders and dark around our hands. Only the girls’ hair was shining in the glow from the lights along the road, in red and in yellow, and the numbers glowed on the speedometer and the tiny blue light for the main beam went on and off with the oncoming traffic and we stopped our singing on the way past Skjetten and were silent on the bridge by the station at Strømmen.

Of course, the trouble with first-person narratives like this is that you spend the whole book inside the head of the narrator.  We get carried along with the thoughts of the character so far, then sometimes we think, hang on a minute, do I really want to be here?  For Arvid Jansen expresses himself beautifully but he is not always the most uplifting company being prone to a depressive outlook on life and an overwhelming sense of defeat.

No act of will would get me out of this state, no leap of thought pull me up. At times the only option was to sit in a chair and wait for the worst ravages to calm down so I could perform the most basic tasks: cut a slice of bread, go to the toilet, or drag myself all those exhausting metres through the hallway to lie down on my bed.

The book moves easily back and forth between the present day and earlier times when Arvid dropped out of college because he wanted to bring a Maoist form of socialism to the industrial workers of his town.  His studies in socialism have created in his head an idealised vision of the working class, but,  “I could not shake off the feeling that the working class I spoke of was not quite the same as the one my mother and father belonged to on a daily basis”.  When he tells his mother that he is going to leave college, her reaction, perhaps unsurprisingly, is to strike his cheek with the flat of her hand.  If you have spent your days working in a factory in order to support you son through college you could be a little disappointed when he throws it back in your face.

He gets a job in a factory, but finds that there is a void between him and the other workers:  “every single time I tried to turn the conversation from football to the factions in the trade union movement – the red, revolutionary, and the blue, conservative – they would simply pat me on the shoulder, laugh and walk away”.

North Denmark

As the book progresses (if that’s the right word for this meander through Arvid’s life) we learn that although he was not his mother’s favourite son.  He seems to have a deep feeling for her , and when he hears of her departure for Jutland, he follows her to the remote beach house.  He finds her sitting on the beach looking out to sea and smoking a cigarette.  She seems underwhelmed to see him,

“It’s me”, I said

“I know who it is.  I heard your thoughts clatter all the way down the road. Are you broke?”

They return to the house and Arvid cuts down a huge pine tree, for reasons I didn’t quite understand.  As far as I can tell, he intends to cut the pine tree into logs but never gets round to it – perhaps showing that Arvid is prone to grand gestures but never seems able to bring anything to a successful conclusion – his marriage, his fathering of the girls, his career as a Maoist.

These events happen in the late 1980s, and towards the end of the book, Arvid hears that the Berlin Wall has fallen.  He is alone on a beach in Jutland, while momentous events are happening at which he is not present (and which perhaps show the bankruptcy of his socialist ideals).  He meditates on death, realising his fear of “that moment when you suddenly realise that every chance of being the person you really wanted to be, is gone for ever”.  I think you would only feel like that if you had consistently taken the wrong route through your life, which Arvid has of course done.  He has left little mark on the planet and at the age of 37 the reader suspects he never will.

I am not sure what the term “Scandinavian” means in terms of describing literature, but if its something to do with bleak landscapes, an eternal dark winter, depressed characters, recourse to alcohol to provide an escape, a slow meandering style of writing then this book is definitely Scandinavian.  However, despite the fact that Arvid is hardly good company to be with, Petterson’s writing is at all times beautiful and it is that kept me reading to the end – and probably open to reading more of his books at a later date. I also reviewed Petterson’s book, To Siberia back in 2009 and wrote, “overall, the grey skies and bleak aspect of the landscape infect the narrative a little more than makes for an enjoyable read” which is not too far from what I’m saying about this one.

I am indebted to Reading Matters for bringing this book to my attention.  Kim gave the book four stars and wrote, “I Curse the River of Time is far from an uplifting novel . . . it has a quiet, understated power that makes you feel as if your life has been enriched by the simple, all-consuming act of reading it”.  I think that gets it just about right.

To Siberia was written in 1996 and won the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize.  [...]]]> 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.

The atmosphere throughout the book is dour but relieved by the accounts of the narrator who has a quirky outlook on life and shares some childhood escapades with her brother Jesper, such as climbing out of the bedroom window at night and wandering through the quiet town and making forays across the frozen waters.

Both brother and sister dream of escape from this cold land, Jesper to Morocco, and the narrator, more surprisingly to Siberia, where after a journey on the Trans-Siberian railway, she would find, “open skies that were cold and clear, where it was easy to breathe and easy to see for long distances” (I thought Denmark was already like that).

The narrator has a bitter existence in the cold of the town, with a father subject to drinking binges and a religious but rather withdrawn mother.  She finds a friend in the more wealthy Lone (the headmaster’s daughter) and borrows books from her father’s extensive library, but alas, Lone later dies of an unknown disease leaving the narrator almost friendless again.

The Germans invade Denmark when the narrator is 14.  The government of Denmark capitulated quickly to the German advance and soldiers are billeted in the village.  There are efforts at resistance and Jesper is drawn to secret adventures, even to the extent of transporting a limpet mine on his bicycle.

The narrator goes swimming with a friend neary young German soldiers who are also bathing and when one of the young men nearly drowns after diving into shallow waters, she dives in and rescues him, pumping air out of her lungs with her knee.  When he comes round and she realises that she has been closer to this German soldier than to her own brother, she slaps him hard on the face.

After the war, Jesper makes it to Morocco, but the narrator only seems to get as far as Oslo and Stockholm, eventually returning home, to find great sadness.  The book ends with no relief from the almost stereotypically Scandinavian gloom, and the last sentence offering a final sigh of despair,

I am 23 years old, there is nothing left in life. Only the rest.

I suppose the sort of thing one usually says about a book like this is that “it is beautifully written” or some such. Well, it is an evocative picture of a time of deprivation and soul-sapping poverty.  While the narrator has a unique outlook on life which gives the book a touch of humour, overall, the grey skies and bleak aspect of the landscape infect the narrative a little more than makes for an enjoyable read.  I cannot help but compare To Siberia with Repartriated by Adriaan Van Dis which treats a not dissimilar theme and setting with far more humour and interest.

It has been interesting to read something Norwegian for a change, and the book is undoubtedly worthwhile, but not one of the best I have read in recent months.

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 [...]]]> 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”.

However, we soon lose Antonus Bellori and move onto a reworking of the Bible stories that feature angels.  Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel,  Sodom and Gomorrah, Noah and the flood all get this treatment.  These are hugely lengthy fictional re-workings of the stories and one is left wondering what the point of them is.  This sort of thing has been done many times before and its hard to see what Knausgaard brings to them other than a strengthened focus on the role of angels. The problem with turning Bible stories into fiction is that the sparse and enigmatic wording of the originals is usually so much better than over-blown speculations on what really happened behind the source material.  Apart from anything else, Knaussaard’s efforts in this area are not terribly interesting and make no attempt to come up with anything really new.

I couldn’t help but compare Knausgaard’s work with Sally Vickers Miss Garnett’s Angel and other books.  Vickers interleaves Biblical material with modern-day characters in a far more skilful way, finding a contemporary relevance which Knausgaard rather misses.

Throughout the book, the writer follows the status of angele during the last 2000 years and he almost seems to think that the great artists who depicted them actually saw them.  The suggests that by following the course of angels through art galleries we can actually trace their changing form (with the rather degenerate cherubs at the end of this long history!).

But I have to keep reminding myself that this is a work of fiction.  Is it a serious study of angels that weaves through this mixture of Bible stories and ancient history?  Or is Knausgaard trying to make some statement which I have failed to see?  The book finishes with a first person account (the author?) of a childhood in Norway with a deranged father and his sons.  The last scene sees the author as an adult  in a small house on a remote island indulging in a spot of self-harm (cutting his chest and face with a piece of glass) and then lying in a bath reflecting on life.  I have no idea why the book ends in this way – it seems to bear no relation to anything that has gone before.

In conclusion, I completely fail to see what the point of this book is.  It is apparently fiction but contains vast amounts of dated and largely irrelevant theological speculations.  The main character, Antinous Bellori scarcely features after the first chapter, and yet the final contemporary story at the end of the book seems to have nothing to do with the preceding material and the theme of angels seems to have been abandoned.  The self-harm at the end has no connection with any part of the novel and I am left thinking that this is one of the most pointless books I have even read.