I Curse the River of TimeBy Per Petterson
|
 |
|---|
Reviewed by Brad Felver
“I am thirty-seven years old,” Arvid Jansen thinks at the end of Per Petterson’s newly translated novel, I Curse the River of Time. “The Wall has fallen. And here I am.”
Such a line, slippery in its attempt at profundity, is at the heart of Petterson’s staggering gifts as a storyteller. I Curse the River of Time tells the story of Arvid Jansen, a recurring character in Petterson’s work and a man Petterson thinks of not as an alter ego so much as a stunt double. The novel seamlessly oscillates between 1989, when Arvid’s wife is divorcing him, his mother is dying, and the Berlin Wall is coming down; and many years earlier, when he was a young man who lost his brother, fell in love, and left the university to become a Communist Laborer. With such a schematic, Petterson forces Arvid into the throes of time’s great paradox: the hurt of the past lingers indefinitely while the few pleasant moments prove terribly ephemeral. Arvid’s tacit understanding of this is all he has. “And here I am,” he thinks. One can’t help but think of Eugene O’Neill: "There is no present or future, only the past happening over and over again—now."
When Arvid learns of his mother’s illness and of her departure from Oslo to their summer house in Denmark, he chases after her as both a concerned son and little boy searching for a pat on the head from his mother. After a day of travel, he arrives and finds her sitting on a sand dune, quietly watching the sea:
She did not turn around, merely said, "Don’t start talking right away."
"It’s me," I said.
"I know who it is," she said. "I heard your thoughts clatter all the way down from the road. Are you broke?"
Damn it, I knew she was ill, she might even die; that was why I was here, that was why I had come after her, I was sure of it, and yet I said:
"Mother, I’m getting a divorce."
Their labyrinthine relationship spins at the center of the novel. It is a bond with no shortage of love but no means of expression. Such a word simply does not exist in their shared lexicon. Their communication, rendered through Petterson’s terse aesthetic, never clicks into simple call and response. Rather, it is call and call, perpetually slipping away from any sort of understanding. One could imagine them casually arguing over the color brown.
Like the gulf separating mother and son, Arvid navigates an estuary connecting the nature of urban life and loneliness. Much of the novel is set in the streets of Oslo, a thrumming city in the midst of modernization. Arvid wanders it largely alone, Petterson’s lean prose masking a rather Dickensian exploration of city life: the larger and louder a city inclines, the more faceless and muted it becomes. A single person can make eye contact where a crowd cannot. A single person can make the specific noise that a horde turns white. Even the trains and trolleys and factories are silent in Petterson’s Oslo. To find intimacy in a surging city, then, would be akin to separating a single water molecule from a rushing river. Human connection cannot be made with so damn many humans around, and so Arvid responds by becoming a Communist laborer—a nameless, faceless proletariat.
Remarkably, Petterson manages to infuse I Curse the River of Time with a measure of levity as well. Like most understated humor, though, it seems inextricably linked with sadness, which is entirely appropriate. When Arvid’s mother learns of her cancer, her first response is misguided anger:
"Look, I’ve been lying awake at night, year after year, especially when the children were small, terrified of dying from lung cancer, and then I get cancer of the stomach. What a waste of time!”
Arvid later curses himself when he "forgets" to be a good Communist for entire days. His negligence is terribly casual. Later, when his mother comes to reconcile with him after months of separation, she says, "Then put the kettle on and let’s get started," as if she were a dentist about to plug a cavity. Petterson litters the drama with such unexpected but necessary moments.
Certainly the greatest joy of reading Petterson’s work, though, is his quiet prose. Line by line it astounds, rewarding slow, methodical reading. Always it is understated, each small detail functioning at many times its stature, lingering in the brain of the reader like some rattle slowly losing its momentum. His prose haunts. Such an aesthetic renders anew even the simplest object or action:
It had been a very hot day, there was a sharp smell of drying seaweed in the air, of half-dead jelly fish baking in the splintering light, the smell of the sea and the prickling scent of marram grass and the tang of newly opened bottles of sweet orange squash…and all around me were my blonde, coarse-limbed brothers.
Though Petterson is often compared to Hemingway and Carver, he has etched a vernacular all his own. The loveliness of his prose lies not only with its distilled nature, but also in its repetitions and unexpected cadences, which infuse his style with a tenderness unseen in other spare prose virtuosos. Arvid repeats himself in carefully meandering sentences, each clause drawing closer to his true thought. The reader hears him puzzle his way through complexity:
So when I stood up, a roaring wind blew through my head, there was spring tide and breaking surf in my brain, I took one step to the side and bumped a chair where a farmer in a suit was sitting, he smelled of cowshed and milk, an uncle, I am certain he was, I had seen him before, and I had nothing against that smell, on the contrary, it reminded me of childhood, not my childhood, but someone’s childhood…
There is a wonderful and bewildering quality to Petterson’s prose, and this is certainly mirrored in Arvid’s muted interaction with the world. He is a man sandwiched in between two diodes—past and future—both clouding the present. Even his narration continually loops back onto itself, a flashback deteriorating even farther back before resuming and finishing and returning to the present. In this way, Petterson avoids the simple, monotonous structure of past informing present. Moreover, it highlights the necessity of nostalgia for a man like Arvid: That which cannot be pleasant at this moment might have another opportunity in a generation or so. Once the cancer takes his mother, Arvid might be able to appropriately idealize their relationship.