I Curse the River of Time

I Curse the River of Time
by Per Petterson
Graywolf Press, 2010. 233 pgs. Fiction

Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses is one of my favorite books of all time, one of the best-written, most beautiful I have ever read. I Curse the River of Time shares the exquisite writing, but the story is so relentlessly gray and defeating the reading becomes hard slogging. Arvid Jansen is the first-person protagonist, a thirty-seven year old who is about to be divorced and whose mother has just been diagnosed with cancer. We see in flashbacks Arvid's courtship of his soon to be lost wife, and of his Communist youth when he forsook the college education his mother had worked so hard to provide him in favor of a factory job with the proletariat. The cold, the dark, Arvid's incessant need for cigarettes and liquor to push back the unhappiness of his life, all speak to an inability to amend what has already been swept away in time's river.

Perhaps it is true, as some say, that only very young countries have the luxury of optimism, of having any hope for nurturing, enduring relationships and happy endings. Petterson certainly shows the Old World view in this book, bleak as a Scandinavian winter. (I Curse the River of Time is a sequel to In the Wake, a book that follows chronologically but that should be read first.)

LW