Without wishing to sound pretentious, or yes, I would dare to point out that Nordic literature currently finds its richest representation in its Norwegian vein. From Jo nesbo but also Gaarder, and each one in their genre, without that most common fidelity of Swedish storytellers to the noir genre.
This marked audacity to bring here today Peter Petterson one of those daring self-taught in the noble art of writing (when really self-learning is the essence of the writer who discovers his gift. But hey, how today doctrine and school of everything are created ...), as I say a self-taught man who ended up making the leap international already around 50.
From his Norway full of great recognized writers, Petterson is here to stay. With a meager work to which he devoted himself as the budding writer always devoted to other needs to survive, Petterson is already that author of reference for his intimate but surprising narrative, alive, exposed to an innovative vision of the world.
Top 3 recommended novels by Per Petterson
Go out to steal horses
From anecdote to transcendence, from detail to symbol. This novel managed to catapult its author due to that strange sensitivity of masterpieces that speak of the universal from the anecdotal.
When is childhood abandoned, on what day? How do you steal a horse without the animal ending up in rebellion? Is the protagonist himself that horse, that indomitable youth that someone has stolen forever?
Narrated in the first person by Trond Sender, a sixty-seven-year-old man who lives isolated in a house in a forest located on the border between Norway and Sweden, the protagonist of Go out to steal horses recalls his life in the summer of 1948, when he was fifteen years old, three years ago that the Germans had left the country, and discovered the truth about the adulterous relationships between his father and his best friend's mother, and about his political past father, former member of the resistance against the Nazis.
Faced with the discovery of eroticism, death and false family harmony, Trond becomes, in a summer, a grown man.
Men in my situation
Despite the commitment to perdition, in that paradoxical balance through which life sometimes slides, every human being needs to reconcile with their past. Otherwise nothing would make sense, especially with children involved. Offspring asking unanswered questions about the future, young people whose eyes it is not always easy to look at again because it is a bit like looking at ourselves in already broken mirrors.
Arvid Jansen leads a lonely and ambitious life. On sleepless nights, he drifts through the city of Oslo aimlessly or goes from bar to bar, seeking refuge in alcohol and in the company of a girl.
One day, a year after his divorce, he receives an unexpected call from his ex-wife, who lives with their three daughters in a house in which there is no trace of their past together. Upon reuniting with what was his family, Arvid cannot help but feel the rejection of Vigdis, his eldest daughter who, however, is the one who needs him the most.
The author of Go out to steal horses He once again surprises critics and audiences with a deep narrative about the vulnerability of a man who has lost his way. Acclaimed for its thorough and concise literary style, this honest and sensitive tale has received multiple accolades and is considered one of the best Norwegian novels of recent years.
I curse the river of time
The curse par excellence of every existentialist thinker or writer. The infinity of time is heavier the less time we have left. Well i knew kundera. This time the maledicent is a Petterson by means of an Arvid faced with the alienating moments of existence when it could still be simply party time.
During the last days of an autumn of external intensity, Arvid, at thirty-seven years old, struggles to find a new anchor in his life, when everything he had until then considered secure falls apart at dizzying speed.
It is the end of the cold war and, as communism comes to an end, Arvid faces his first divorce and the diagnosis that his mother suffers from cancer. I curse the river of time is an honest, heartbreaking and ironic portrait of a complicated relationship between a mother and a son, a story that explores the inability of people to communicate and understand each other in all their human complexity, and does so with prose precise and beautiful.
