ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nora Khan is a recent Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate. Her short stories can be found in Conjunctions and Hunger Mountain. She writes book reviews for the New Haven Advocate, and has worked as fact-checker and researcher at The New Republic and Details. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, been an Iowa Arts Fellow, won the Howard Frank Mosher Short Fiction Prize, and has twice been a finalist in Glimmer Train’s Best Short Story Award for New Writers competition.

Review of Per Petterson’s I Curse the River of Time, translated from the Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund, with the author

By Nora Nahid Khan


Fragile images of departure, the village back

then

I curse the river of time; thirty-two years have

passed.

 

From a lesser known poem by Chairman Mao, these lines are a simple lamentation of a fact that can only be repeated in literature so many times: time moves on relentlessly. Per Petterson, the Norwegian author of Out Stealing Horses, devotes himself to probing the bitter fruit of this reflection in his new novel, I Curse the River of Time (Graywolf Press, August 2010). We begin in Oslo in 1989 before the Berlin Wall falls, as thirty-seven-year-old Arvid Jansen, a paper factory worker, is getting a divorce. His mother has just been diagnosed with stomach cancer. She says goodbye to her husband of forty years, and boards her favorite ship, the Holger Danske, to return to the family’s summer home in Denmark, her homeland.

In the midst of her own crisis, she has no time for Arvid’s; besides, she holds a nearly seventeen-year-old grudge against her son. Right after he turned twenty, Arvid dropped out of college to follow the Communist Party’s recruitment of members to the new industrial workforce. When his mother heard of his choice, she slapped him, said, “You idiot,” and walked out of the coffee shop in which they sat. This opened the abyss in their intimacy that is the book’s subject.

Over a few grim days at the summer house, Arvid, his mother, and her friend Hansen circle around each other like grim, sullen wolves. They occasionally sit down to drink and sit in uncomfortable silence. Arvid rambles, mentally, through a series of disconnected vignettes about his childhood, his courtship, and his struggle to continue work as a Party member, though his years of work in the factory turned out to run very distant from the world of Party ideals (“I had stood at the machine for six months, and all this time, I had tried to carry out every single Party resolution, but I had not succeeded.”).

In Part I, as his mother is leaving Norway, Arvid is driving a car with his seven- and ten-year-old daughters along gravel roads, in Nittedal, we’re told, past the “chequered sheep and the old electric fences with the white porcelain knobs on the posts.” They sing Paul McCartney songs, winding happily, while acutely aware of Arvid’s wife, their mother, having stayed behind. This scene is notable as one of Arvid’s lightest memories (and we’re only on page 23, of 233.)

During this mobile idyll, the car swerves to avoid an imagined darkness, the

 

all-consuming black where the farmers had ploughed the fields just in time before winter came falling, and all light was drained out of them and simply vanished. We drove a little faster past those scary spots and laughed a bit too and cried out in high-pitched frightened voices:

 

“Watch out, for God’s sake,” we screamed. “Here comes a black hole!”

 

Arvid explains to his daughters that black holes were places where “lives were sucked down, whole worlds sucked down, maybe our world sucked down.” Black holes are one organizing concept for I Curse the River of Time: memory’s lacunae and emotional elisions riddle the fabric of Arvid’s obsessive remembrance. Petterson renders this portrait of Arvid’s lackluster depression as bulky, immense, and shot through intermittently with terrible anxiety and pain (“If someone had asked me, how do you feel now? I would say, it hurts right here, and point to a place at the top of my chest, or rather at the very bottom of my throat.”). Like Mao in his poem, Arvid grapples on a symbolic stage with Time until he is mangled, on hands and knees, barely able to make the few steps to his own bed: “No act of will will get me out of this state, no leap of thought pull me up.”

Arvid’s central dilemma is how to speak to his impossible, unsympathetic mother while in his anguished mental state that begs for a bit of support. Arvid’s Danish mother is elusive to those around her and will remain largely elusive to us, as well. She loves Albert Finney in old movies; she hated being a housewife; it is hinted that life did not turn out for her as she thought it would. She had great hopes for Arvid to pursue a future more worthy, in her eyes, than that of a factory worker. She rarely speaks to him save to deliver a judgmental quip, equivalents of “I told you so” or “What else is new.” Her cool contempt is at times unbearable to read. She is scathing, domineering, unforgiving, and worst of all, indifferent. In one childhood memory, Arvid sees his mother on the beach reading a magazine, smoking as the children play in the sand: “She did not pay attention; she turned her direction to other things.” As an adult, his child-self remains intact; he still longs for her to look at him, respond to him. In a present-day scene at the summer house, after slipping between two boats into the ocean, Arvid stands bedraggled and helpless, wet, before his mother. She does not offer him a towel and simply looks at him with the “smile on her lips that was not a smile as there was nothing to smile about that anyone could see, but it was how she looked when her mind was somewhere else and definitely not in a place that those around her could have guessed.”

As we become more acquainted with Arvid’s ambivalence towards his mother, what we, as readers, are meant to feel for her remains equally unclear. Her stern pretension, her seeming lack of sympathy for her son’s depression, and her indifference, are as opaque as the silence she maintains with her son. As she is most vividly described through others, she herself remains a visual and physical blank, save her smile. At her fiftieth birthday party, her neighbors and friends make toasts to a woman “who was so close to their hearts, who was one of them, and yet was not quite like them, and maybe that was what they liked about her.”

At the summer house, Arvid ambles about the house, to the ocean, to Hansen’s place, which abuts. On a walk, he sees what he determines as omen:

 

…there was a pheasant standing dead still in the stripy shadow of a leafless bush, its strange, long tail feathers pointing towards the road, and it was brown and green and red within a silence so compact I found it menacing. Only one shiny eye was moving inside its red frame and it followed every step I took, and this eye frightened me.

 

This terrible bird’s eye “burning into [his] back,” he trucks back home. The pheasant eye is also his mother’s eye of judgment, transmogrified, a cold eye roving after him “within a silence so compact.” In fact, it is his mother’s menacing silence that frames every passage in this novel.

 

What is there left to do, Petterson seems to say, in the face of this impasse between mother and son, these ossified stances and blocks to expression, apart from fully exploring the contours of a wild regret? It isn’t as though Arvid could, well, inhabit an adult conflict, discuss his choices with his mother, defend them or relinquish them, or open any kind of dialogue. No, that would be impossible. We’re left, as readers, to grapple with a trite regret, over “all that is never said.”

Moreover, Arvid’s mother never asks Arvid the questions she could. She has no intention of reconciling herself to his choices as an adult, consumed by disappointments that she hoped Arvid would allay. Her only redeemable quality seems to be that she is a hopeful mother. Arvid recognizes this, two months after he tells her he is forgoing college: she visits him out of a grim sense of duty, and had not “come to apologize, she had come because I was her son. That’s how it was. She had come because she was a mother. And yet it was too late. Something was broken, a wire had been stretched too taut and had started to fray and it snapped with a crack you could hear between the walls."

 

This brings me to one of the great flaws of this novel: Arvid’s selective amnesia. When Petterson has the opportunity to develop Arvid’s psyche in some fruitful way, Arvid conveniently, inexplicably, blanks. He explains this obnoxious tendency in a short passage: “Inside my brain there was something inattentive, some slippery patch of Teflon, where things that came swirling in and struck it bounced off again and were gone, a fickleness of the mind. I was not paying attention, things happened and were lost. Important things [emphasis added].” This “patch” could be interesting if Arvid wondered, at any point, why, in fact he has this Teflon patch that allows him to glide over the “important things”. If things that aren’t the “important things” - unimportant things - are, ostensibly, the substance of Arvid’s memory-fiction, they should merit interest on their own. Stylistically, visually, they often do (which I’ll get to in a moment).

On an affective level, however, they do not. Take his memory of his younger brother dying in the hospital, hooked up to a ventilator that “pushed air into his lungs in a way no human being had ever breathed.” Arvid searches fruitlessly for the good memories twenty-seven years must have produced between them. Yet, he cannot: “I could not remember a single fond thing we had shared.” Of course, any critical demand that Arvid produce good memories for us is a tyranny of its own. Alternately, without allowing any memories of his brother, the scene is reduced to Arvid gazing at his mother, grieving. He thinks:

 

If I were the one lying in the ventilator here…perhaps already dead, would she then be so unconditionally absorbed by what was happening to me? Would she immerse herself so completely in my destiny, or was the shadow I cast not long enough, not substantial enough, for her?

 

Placed in this death scene, his obsession with his mother’s approval is absurd. Would his mother grieve at his bedside the same way? One might ask, Who cares? His childish reflections comprise a largely uninteresting paralysis. His memories, though, are of nothing really good, and also of nothing particularly bad. He exists in a purgatorial twilight of generally placid memories.

His bizarre forgetfulness also interrupts his attempts to connect with his mother. For his speech on his mother’s fiftieth birthday, he decides to give her a speech about the “Rio Grande” between them. He writes a short, fanciful story on two A4 sheets, where he explains to his mother that the “river has dried up. It’s a total surprise, all the experts are knocked out, and only a trickle remains so now it is easy to cross.” He imagines that he will laugh and say, “so you see, nothing’s too late for us, we can walk right across or meet halfway and only get our feet a little wet, and that’s not a big deal, is it?”

At her birthday, he proceeds to get spectacularly drunk, forgets his sheets, and stands up before the dinner party only to realize he has no memory of his speech:

 

I was going to say something about the Rio Grande, that I could remember, but I could not remember what about the Rio Grande, what it was about that river that was important, and then I let it go and felt the consonants fill my mouth so awkwardly that I would not be able to pull them out in whole pieces. My mother looked at me in an almost dreamy way, slightly out of focus, I thought, and she waited…

 

His mortification is as paralyzing as his mother’s unfocused contempt.

What Arvid has left, in such ruin, is to obsessively render his own past migratory paths: how he literally used to move around Veitvet, or in the Dælenenga district of Oslo in his twenties, or, as a little boy, in the town in North Jutland in Denmark. Petterson suggests here what a man as deadened as Arvid would do with his time. Arvid relives his paths in a glut of meticulous details, as though the remembering holds some incantatory power. I thought of him tracing his routes on holographic city maps in different colors of chalk. Some passages are little cinematic gems, as here, imagining his mother driving away from home:

 

The taxi drove on across the windswept open stretch of marram grass and sand and scrub, which the wind kept down to knee height one year after the other, and the sea lay taut this early morning like a blue-grey porous skin and the sky above the sea was as white as milk. Where the tarmac turned into gravel, the car pulled in between the ancient dog roses and gnarled pine trees and the whole trip lasted no more than a quarter of an hour.

 

The second sentence here, coming after the eye tracks the movement of sea, sky, and scrub, is exemplary, using a structure Petterson employs often and with power. Where the tarmac turned into gravel, the car pulled in between the ancient dog roses: the inversion of “where the tarmac turned into gravel,” leading into “the car pulled in,” and the book-end of “between the dog roses” makes for a small poem. I might see a car pulling in between ancient dog roses, where the tarmac turns into gravel, then see the gnarled pine trees; I might be looking down at the ground at the tarmac turning into gravel, then see the pine trees and dog roses above me. Petterson mimics, here, the mind’s attempt to “trap” a scene, by paradoxically doing the confusing work of movement. To then sandwich in “and the whole trip lasted no more than a quarter of an hour” into the same sentence forces the mind to backtrack, reconsider the scene, contract and expand over the time given.

At other points, the same atmospheric details become excruciating:

 

I passed the nice-looking red telephone booth and came to the slope where as children we risked our lives on toboggans running down the steep road between the houses, blue woolen caps pulled down over our ears in a childhood whirled away by time, and then past the bend […] and further along the terraces down the flagstone footpath and at last through the door to my parents’ flat.

 

Drained of feeling, these images of telephone booths and blue caps and flagstones are rather like well-lit, glossy video shorts that play as visual white noise at an art exhibit.

Arvid has one profound redemption here, within this morbid circling. He finds a powerful way to contend with his mother’s existence, and approximate intimacy.

The closest that Arvid comes to his mother is imagining her when she is alone in her private moments. His narration of her times alone is both a claim of her perspective and an elegy for her before her death. Petterson suggests that the ability to imagine the private discomfort, pain, and unhappiness of someone who is unkind or indifferent to one is the most generous a mind can be. Part I opens with Arvid’s painting of her alone on the Holger Danske:

 

When she had found her cabin, she placed the suitcase on a chair, took a glass from the shelf above the sink, cleaned it carefully before she opened the suitcase and pulled out a half-bottle from underneath her clothes. It was Upper Ten, her favorite brand of whisky when she drank the hard liquor, which she did, I think, more often than we were aware of […] She washed her tears away in front of the mirror above the tap and dried her face and tugged at her clothes the way plump women nearly always do…

 

He “cannot imagine she craved company in the cafeteria” and instead sits alone. He imagines her exhaustion, the way she would grip tables and rails on the unsteady way back to her room.

There is remarkable beauty in this very simple act of describing his mother alone, and Petterson masters both tenderness and tragedy. In Part IV, Hansen, Arvid, and his mother take a drive to the island of Læsø, where she had lived after the war for a few years, pregnant with her first son. He imagines the conversation she has with the current resident of their old house, how she might say to this woman, “‘I had to go to Norway. I thought I had no choice. But I did.’ And then my mother cried with her head on her knees.” This may be unlikely of her, given what we know of her demeanor and reserve. However, as Arvid enters his mother’s silence, protective of a weeping, self-conscious, and quietly bitter lush, and allows her to express her deep-seated regret, he is also, in a sense, able to gain an affective intimacy through imagining her.

This is an intimacy that he can only gain through imagining his mother alone, as she would never invite him into her private world, thoughts, and wonder. If not so burdened by his “bitter gift of pain,” Arvid could find, Petterson suggests, a solace and closeness to the woman who will always hold him at bay.



Published July 2010