I Curse the River of Time

by Per Petterson

Translated from the original Norwegian by Charlotte Barslund

A haunting literary masterpiece by the bestselling and prize-winning author of Out Stealing Horses
It is 1989 and all over Europe Communism is crumbling. Arvid Jansen 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 everything around him is changing at staggering speed. As he attempts to negotiate the present, he remembers holidays on the beach with his brothers, his early working life devoted to Communist ideals, courtship, and his relationship with his tough, independent mother - a relationship full of distance and unspoken pain that is central to Arvid's life.

(From Publisher).

Per Petterson was born in Oslo in 1952 and worked for several years as an unskilled labourer, a bookseller, a writer and a translator until he made his literary debut in 1987 with the short story collection Ashes in my Mouth, Sand in my Shoes which was widely acclaimed by critics. He made his literary breakthrough in 2003 with the prize-winning novel Out Stealing Horses, which has been translated to 40 languages so far and won many prizes.

The author is a prize-winning Norwegian novelist and a trained librarian. This novel is a beautiful book about love, regret, family secrets and failed revolution; describing the ways that the present and the past are always intertwined and showing how the personal and political are one and the same. The novel displays wisdom that only profound loss can bring.

A dark tragi-comedy, this is a story of a man reaching a crisis point in his life, portraying complicated personal relationships in beautiful, powerful prose.

Arvid endures every type of early-middle-age malaise. His marriage is disintegrating, his mother is dying and his ideals are collapsing. What ensues is a work of blackest tragicomedy and the literary equivalent of Munch's The Scream: As spare, cold and unforgiving as the Scandinavian winter that it is setting.