Past lives
By S. Kirk Walsh
Eight years after the U.S. publication of his international break-out success, “Out Stealing Horses,” Norwegian author Per Petterson returns this spring with two books: his sixth novel, “I Refuse,” and the reissue of his debut collection, “Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes: Stories,” originally distributed in Norway in 1987. Both volumes are being published by Graywolf Press and translated by Don Bartlett, who also translates the books of Karl Ove Knausgaard and Jo Nesbø, among several others.
Readers familiar with Petterson’s work will recognize many reoccurring themes in his latest novel: childhood friendship, grief, isolation, lifelong trauma. “I Refuse” begins with a chance meeting of two former friends, Jim and Tommy, on a suspension bridge just outside of Oslo. “I knew him at once. It was Tommy,” writes Petterson from Jim’s perspective. “His hair had thinned and was graying. But the horizontal scar above his left eye was still evident, white, luminous, silver.”
Over three decades, the friends had gone their separate ways, but the indelible past continues to haunt them. Both come from difficult family histories: Jim grew up alone with his mother having never met his father, and Tommy lived with his younger sister, Siri; his twin sisters; and his alcoholic father after their mother mysteriously disappeared one Christmas.
Like many of Petterson’s other novels, the narrative loops and backtracks through time to create a layered portrait of friendship and family — and the memories, wants and losses that go along with this intimate terrain. The reader meets the characters in 2006 and then returns to 1966 and then 1971 and later 2003; for every transition, the author provides signposts of the characters’ names and dates, guiding the reader easily through his shifting timescape. The novel is largely told from the perspectives of Jim and Tommy, but Petterson also includes sections from Siri, Tommy’s mother, and Jonsen (the man who becomes Tommy’s guardian).
Through the author’s rhythmic progression of sentences, an illumination of sorts gathers on the page. “Tommy could hear the woodpecker at the top of the telegraph pole tapping against the metal in the still air,” writes Petterson during a moment when Tommy recognizes the lasting distance of his closest friend. “It was anemones and snowfall. It was spring in full bloom, it was summer, it was winter. It was everything at once. He stood watching for a while. Then he turned and went back in and closed the door. People die in wars, too, he thought. They are here, and bang, they’re gone.”
Other sentences are long and sprawling, drifting further into the characters’ interior lives. In its entirety, “I Refuse” is masterful in its structure, and makes for a breathtaking read.
One of the benefits of an older author writing over the years is the opportunity to read his earlier works to provide a glimpse into his initial literary impulses. Sophisticated craftsmanship frequently evolves out of an early aesthetic and specific voice. A few examples are E.L. Doctorow’s debut novel “Welcome to Hard Times” (1960), Lorrie Moore’s first collection, “Self-Help” (1985), and Dan Chaon’s debut, “The Fitting Ends” (1996). Reading these works can be both instructive and inspiring for writers and readers alike. With Petterson’s slim first collection, “Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes,” 10 stories are told from the child perspective of Arvid (the name of the protagonist in many of the author’s later novels, including “I Curse the River Time”) during the early ’60s.
Upon first reading, these stories appear as slight vignettes, but within a few stories, an interconnected narrative of one family unfolds. Arvid’s factory-worker father is a former boxer and soldier in World War II, and this father-son relationship tenderly plays out during the course of the stories. Other recurring characters include an irascible uncle named Rolf, a working mother, an older sister and a cantankerous neighbor. There are fishing trips and a death of an unlikable grandfather. “Arvid turned away, for there was something so strange about his dad’s face that he couldn’t look,” writes Petterson when the family learns of the grandfather’s death. “He looked at the treetops, he looked at the cabin roof, at the sky and the shimmering fjord.” The father retreats into a waiting car, and Arvid notes that his father doesn’t wave to him.
In “Like a Tiger in a Cage,” the young protagonist tries to comprehend the passage of time and his mother’s aging. “He tried to work out what could have happened to her, and then he realised it was time that had happened,” writes Petterson, “and it was happening to him too, every second of the day. He held his hands to his face as if to keep his skin in place and for many nights he lay clutching his body, feeling time sweeping through it like little explosions.” This simple innocence permeates all of the stories, and in the end, Arvid comes of age as he begins to understand his father’s limitations.
Throughout my reading life there are a handful of writers who produce a remarkable effect: Marilynne Robinson, Michael Ondaatje, Anne Carson. An authenticity and knowingness pulse underneath their masterful sentences, connecting deeply to my own life experience. At times, it feels like their elegant prose might break me apart, but instead by the book’s end, I’m somehow put back together in a slightly different way. Petterson’s “I Refuse” provides this kind of elevated reading experience: A seamless emotional alchemy lifts off the page that, in turn, expands a reader’s understanding of the human condition. It is equal parts uncomfortable, exhilarating and memorable.