If you're looking for a dose of chilly, melancholy realism, your search is over. The first book written by Per Petterson since his award-winning Out Stealing Horses is a son's aching recollections of a mother recently diagnosed with cancer who never quite understood him.
Thirty-seven-year-old Arvid has never been the most beloved member of the family--he's black-haired like a refugee child, unlike his four blond brothers. A committed Communist revolutionary, he has given up his college education to work in a factory as a proletarian and is now suffering acute depression from an impending divorce and separation from his two little girls, ages seven and 10. The narrative drifts dreamlike through time, back and forth, in and out of November 1989, when his mother is diagnosed with stomach cancer, abandons her job on the assembly line of a chocolate factory and departs the very next day for her home town in Denmark. Arvid decides to pursue her and try to make things right, and together mother and son re-enter the past, filled with childhood memories, both of them haunted by Arvid's younger brother, who died six years before.
It's all recounted in spare, unadorned prose, but don't let the subtle, understated language fool you. The book packs some nice punches when you least expect them, like the identity of the sinister stalker on the ferry to Denmark who terrorizes Arvid. Brilliant little vignettes abound, unsentimental and yet strangely touching--his mother's neighborhood 50th birthday party, in which Arvid taps his knife against his glass and stands, but finds he has nothing to say, or the scene in which Arvid decides to do what his weak, elderly father cannot: chop down the last pine tree beside the family home.
The title comes from one of the personal, nonpolitical poems of Mao.
"Fragile images of departure, the village back then.
I curse the river of time; thirty-two years have passed."
Never upbeat, never suspenseful, without a plot or even a real understanding of Arvid and his mother, this atmospheric, brooding novel weaves its spell with dignity and honesty, revealing how we really live, daring to be unrelentingly realistic about the many regrets and disappointments of life. Bleak, maybe, but Petterson's unflinching realism in itself is heroic and inspirational. He confronts the non-plots of our lives with uncompromising words and eyes wide open. --Nick DiMartino
Shelf Talker: An atmospheric, brooding novel about how lives are really lived--bleak, yet heroic and inspirational.