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.
“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
“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
“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.”
