Per Petterson in 2007
Robertson Davies once nominated Chekhov and Ibsen as "the two great Canadian dramatists." Sadly for him, he didn't live long enough to read the Norwegian novelist Per Petterson, whose work, had he known it, would surely have inspired Davies to expand his Nordic canon.
Canadians will find nothing exotic in Petterson's voice, so deeply embedded in its rocky northern landscape as to seem strikingly familiar; nor in the diffident, battered survivors who populate it. Basking in sentences as pure as a cool north wind on a piney shore, they are more apt to think that somebody has finally gotten it right. Or that at last Alice Munro has written a novel, her masterpiece, in Scandinavian guise.
Petterson took the long way home, arriving in North America with trumpet-call coverage in The New York Times for his fifth novel, Out Stealing Horses, which went on to win the Dublin IMPAC award as the best novel of 2007 in any language. I Curse the River of Time, published in Norwegian in 2008, is the first of his novels to be brought out in Canada.
A moving account of a lonely man's attempt to make peace with his dying mother, the novel has little in the way of plot. It meanders through time, following a minimalist stream of consciousness. The writing is immaculate and the sense of place striking.
It is the latter, which Petterson attributes to the influence of seminal Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun, that actually makes it seem most Canadian.
"Very often for me the landscape is just as important as the people in it," Petterson says on the line from New York, where he had just landed to begin his first U.S. tour. It's a topic he engages with enthusiasm, and one that explains so much of his method.
"Sometimes we say our minds influence the landscape, that we humanize it in some way. But it also works the other way," he explains. "If you live like me pretty far into the forest you get influenced by nature. You can become a little tree-like at times. You're always looking at the trees, and then you realize the trees are looking at you. You're not the centre all the time."
Trond Sander, the protagonist of Out Stealing Horses, retreats to the forest, having "lost interest in talking to people." Arvid Jansen, the anti-hero at the centre of I Curse the River of Time, stands stunned beneath a leaden sky as fate destroys his marriage, strips away his children and prepares to kill his mother. He is a buffoon, and his mother is a hard person to love, but the story of their difficult relationship is a masterpiece of emotional truth-telling.
Arvid Jansen is a recurrent figure in Petterson's work, a man of about the author's age who grew up in the same working-class district of eastern Oslo and shares many other details of his biography. But Arvid is not so much an alter ago as his "stunt man," the author says, a what-if figure he deliberately exposes to "blows a little harder than I take, because that's more interesting."
Petterson, 58, has absorbed his own share of blows, having lost his mother, father, brother and niece in the 1990 fire that destroyed the ferry Scandinavian Star. Funerals figure prominently in his fiction.
"Death is very special," he says. "Although it's such a big part of life, it's something you really can't fathom. It's really strange." He never visits the family graves. "I haven't been there for 15 years or something. On the other hand, I think about them all the time."
Although his own family and circumstances are recognizable in his fiction, Petterson says, "I tend to write about what could have happened instead of what did happen." He approaches his material instinctively, with no plan or plot in mind.
"Picasso said, 'If you know exactly what you're going to do, what's the point of doing it?'" he explains. "I think I work a little like that. But then you don't really know what you're going to do. So you just hope for the best and trust your intuition."
Stylistically, I Curse the River of Time is notable as being the first of his novels Petterson himself has helped to translate. As an artist who boasts of having bought his first Bob Dylan record in 1965, he knows the rhythms of English intimately and sets them to work with real expertise.
Not that it makes him any more comfortable in the centre of the media universe, celebrated as America's latest literary discovery. "It's kind of like science fiction," he says. "I'm a working-class boy from Oslo, Norway. We don't do this too much."
So come to Canada, Mr. Petterson. You will be right at home.