American fans of Norwegian author Per Petterson's novels, like Out Stealing Horses and To Siberia, will be delighted that Graywolf Press has decided to publish the collection Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes, the book that marked Petterson's literary debut in 1987. These spare, outwardly simple stories offer an early glimpse of the psychological acuity that's distinguished his entire body of work.
Ashes comprises 10 stories set in Oslo in the early 1960s, each portraying an episode in the life of young Arvid Jensen, the protagonist (as an adult) of Petterson's 2010 novel, I Curse the River of Time. Arvid lives in a row house with his family: his father, a shoe factory worker turned toothbrush assembler; his mother, a Dane who cleans a music school at night; and an older sister.
If there's a theme to the collection, it's Arvid's loss of illusions, as in the affecting tale "Like a Tiger in a Cage," where he first senses the inevitability of time's passage, noticing that "it was time that had happened" when he compares a photograph of his mother before his birth to her appearance in the present. "The Black Car," which deals with the unexpected death of Arvid's grandfather, is a complex meditation on the reality of generational succession.
As in his novels, Petterson's prose is uncluttered, evoking comparisons to Raymond Carver, to whom he's acknowledged his literary debt. Though his novels inevitably are more complex, Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes possesses all the qualities that make Per Petterson's larger works so impressive. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer