Although released this year, Per Petterson actually wrote I Curse The River of Time back in 2008. Ignoring their capitalist impulses, Harvill Secker didn’t rush out a translation to take advantage of the massive success of his previous novel, Out Stealing Horses. They decided to let it simmer and wait for a quality, author-approved English translation. In vain, as it happens.

The plot revolves around Arvid, a middle-aged Norwegian who dropped out of college early to follow his Communist idealism and work in a paper factory, an act which led to a rift between him and his mother. When his mother is diagnosed with cancer, she heads off alone to the since-deserted family home, and Arvid follows her, hoping to mend things between them before it’s too late.

Told in the first person, the detached voice of Arvid is difficult to connect with, for both his own family and the reader. This is despite its familiarity, as throughout the novel, Petterson’s sparse prose carries the undeniable influence of Hemingway. His use of understated natural imagery is definitive of the Hemingway style, and a later episode where Arvid cuts down a pine tree outside his childhood home could almost have been lifted straight out of The Big Two-Hearted River.

More than anything however, it’s Hemingway’s pared down, muted voice, all short sentences and simple words, which echoes around River of Time’s pages.

Here is Hemingway’s hero stopping for a smoke:

Nick sat down against a charred stump and smoked a cigarette. His pack balanced on top of the stump, harness holding ready, a hollow moulded in it from his back. Nick sat smoking, looking out over the country. He did not need to get his map out. He knew where he was from the position of the river.

From The Big Two-Hearted River: Part I, Ernest Hemingway

And here’s Petterson’s doing the same:

I sat down to rest with my feet in the trench I had dug. I pulled the gloves off, rolled another cigarette, lit it with my lighter and smoked it all the way down with my eye closed. The cigarette tasted strangely good. It made me smile.

I lifted my legs out from the trench and stood up and reached for the axe. It felt good in my hands.

The two are identical in tone, and could almost be two separate takes, objective and subjective, on the same moment. The characters are shell-shocked, cocooned against the outside world by the residue of events they cannot forget. Their ears are still ringing. They can’t connect.

Both Hemingway’s story and Petterson’s novel concern central male characters returning to elements of their youth as part of a healing process Nick Adams was returning to the camping spots of his youth in an attempt to overcome the post-traumatic stress disorder thrown upon him by World War I. Arvid follows his mother to his childhood home in order to try to reconcile himself with her before it’s too late. The difference is that Arvid brings his troubles upon himself, repeatedly and in such an inexplicable manner that it’s difficult to work up any empathy for him at all.

The duality of a river as a central motif is also common to both the pieces. Hemingway’s river was a force of nature, thundering deafeningly both through the forests of Michigan and the mind of Nick Adams as he attempts to reconnect with his old self. Petterson’s imagery is not quite as forceful. Primarily, his river is used in the familiar depiction of the inescapable flow of years, sweeping us up and pushing us irrevocably onwards.  The second river alluded to is one which runs contrary to the traditional linear progression of time and which is solely concerned with inter-personal relationships. Beginning as a trickle of acrimony between Arvid and his mother, brought on by Arvid’s leaving college, over time it grows into a wide, fast-flowing chasm of things unsaid and undone which neither of them has the strength to bridge.

Where Petterson’s prose falls down is in its apparent lack of confidence in the reader to understand the inner tumult of the characters. Whereas Hemingway let his characters get on with what they were doing and trusted his audience to fill in the blanks, Petterson feels the need to accompany the blander aspects of his characters’ existence with frothy attempts at significance. It’s as if he has to assert that, yes, his characters may just be doing some grocery shopping, but inside they’re a wrenching mess of angst, honest. This juxtaposition of the everyday with the introspective extraordinary is a notable endeavour, because it’s a representation of the emotional currents which often whirl beneath the surface of much human behaviour. Unfortunately, when coupled with Arvid’s passive, unresponsive voice, it often leads to amateurish sentences, sometimes unintentionally humorous, like this:

I smoked the Petteroe 3 cigarette I had rolled myself, and I had all the time in the world in a way I have never had since.

Or this, from the same tree-chopping scene mentioned earlier:

I shouted out ‘Goddamn, I can’t take it anymore’ but I did not know what it was I could not take.

It would be easy to blame the translator for constructing a Scandinavian timbre which just doesn’t resonate with English-language readers. But her previous work, coupled with the fact that she worked with Petterson on the translation of River of Time suggests that the book is as close to the texture of the original Norwegian as possible. Unfortunately, overall it comes across as passionless and aloof, rendering the intense turbulence at the heart of the story into an unengaging shrug.

Reviewed by Paul Whitehead

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