“[Per Petterson] provides one
of literature’s greatest gifts in his novels—an absorbing interiority that
creates a welcome refuge from our cacophonous world. His books are suffused
with a luxurious, downy silence, a quiet that allows us to slow down and sink
into spare language that evokes complex emotions and primal sensations such as
cold, wet, darkness and light with surprising force.”
An August
IndieBound “Indie Next
Great Reads” selection
One of the Millions “Most Anticipated Books of 2010”
On the summer reading lists of the Wall Street
Journal, Entertainment Weekly, Time,
and Newsday
It is 1989, and all over Europe Communism is crumbling.
Arvid Jansen, thirty-seven, is in the throes of a divorce. At the same time,
his mother is diagnosed with cancer. Over a few intense autumn days, we follow
Arvid as he struggles to find a new footing in his life, while all the
established patterns around him are changing at a staggering speed. As he
attempts to negotiate the present, he casts his mind back to holidays on the
beach with his brothers, to courtship, and to his early working life, when as a
young Communist he abandoned his studies to work on a production line.
I Curse
the River of Time is an honest, heartbreaking yet humorous
portrayal of a complicated mother-son relationship told in Petterson’s precise
and beautiful prose.
“Subtly incisive. . . . Clean sentence after clean sentence,
Petterson conveys both the melancholy and the demi-pleasurable sensation of
being fundamentally untethered.”
—STACEY D'ERASMO, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
"Clear, colloquial and unadorned, the writing doubtless owes something to Hamsun and maybe just as much to Hemingway. . . . And at moments when a lot of American prose seems fizzy and over-rich, the sentences in I Curse the River of Time go down like an eye-watering shot of aquavit. They evoke a landscape, mental and otherwise, that while a little wintry and severe, is appealing precisely because it’s so off the beaten track."
—CHARLES MCGRATH, THE NEW YORK TIMES
“An emotional
suckerpunch. . . . Petterson blends enough hope with the gorgeously evoked
melancholy to come up with a
heartbreaking and cautiously optimistic work.”
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, starred review
“Petterson tells another poignant, harrowing and sometimes comic story of a man coming to
terms with his dying mother, his failures (job, marriage) and his failures in
the eyes of his mother: ‘You squirt!’ But mother
and son are bound by feelings and memories for which even the word ‘love’ doesn’t
do justice.”
—THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
“There’s no denying the novel’s Raymond Carver-like power
as Arvid and his mother come to terms with how life hands you hope just before
it hands you disappointment and tragedy. Petterson doesn’t dole out comforts,
simply the quiet advice that since we can't choose how we die, we’d better be
careful how we choose to live.”
—ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
“In Petterson’s hands [I Curse the River of Time] is the ideal vehicle for displaying the
author’s considerable talent at perfectly conveying the unsaid. He’s a master
of quietude, as he first revealed in his runaway hit Out Stealing Horses. Yet here he abandons the whisper of violence Horses had, and his writing is stronger
for it. It’s now unfiltered Petterson, and it’s awesome.”
—DREW TOAL, TIME OUT NEW YORK
“Tracing the history of [Arvid] Jansen’s life and
exploring politics, philosophy, the nature of love, and the question of how to
live a good life, Petterson’s latest is melancholy,
beautiful, and at times darkly
funny—another
extraordinary novel from a master of the form.”
—JILL OWENS, POWELL’S BOOKS, Portland, OR
“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.”
—SHELF
AWARENESS
“The novel abounds in Peterson’s delicate dialogue
between present and past selves. . . . Add this sense of the deep archaeology
of emotion to a tact and nuance in each sculpted paragraph that ought to make clumsier authors weep with
envy, and you have another
masterclass in the alchemising of time and loss into the gold of art.”
—BOYD TONKIN, THE INDEPENDENT (U.K.)
“All the inevitability of life, its fragile glue and the
doubts that stalk the survivors are summoned and considered in Petterson’s
candid, allusive fiction. There is no easy sentiment, only genuine emotional power. His tender new novel is as masterfully evocative as In the Wake and Out Stealing Horses, as gentle
as To Siberia, and as
exceptional as all three.”
—THE IRISH TIMES
“Fans of Out Stealing Horses will not be
disappointed by Petterson’s latest novel, which pulses with lyrical prose. Set against the backdrop of the collapse
of Communism in 1989, the story follows Arvid, who, when his mother is
diagnosed with cancer, joins her at their summer house. Shifting between the
present and Arvid’s memories, I
Curse the River of Time explores the strained relationship between
mother and son, as well as Arvid’s struggle to make sense of a life that has
gotten away from him.”
—NATALIE DELBUSSO, WOLFGANG BOOKS, Phoenixville, PA
“The atmosphere of this latest from Petterson, famed for
the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award winner Out
Stealing Horses, is as gray as the stark Norwegian landscape. Melancholy
permeates every character like a dense Oslo fog. Yet, this author’s gift is his ability to convey so much emotion in such a
sparse prose style.”
