The Austerity Artist
LORENTZEN, CHRISTIAN
The Austerity Artist To Siberia By Per Petterson Translated by Anne Born Graywolf. 245 pp. $22.00. Reviewed by Christian Lorentzen Senior editor, "Harper's" A former librarian, printer and...
...Set in austere Nordic landscapes and narrated by melancholy loners, Petterson's fiction conforms to those sentiments...
...I hope to see him outstrip himself again...
...I'm no peasant," the boy jeers, "I am a proletarian...
...The narrator is manhandled by a German officer searching for her brother, who is hiding in a shack he built as a boy on the outskirts of the village...
...She makes a friend at school who dies mysteriously...
...Turning a second time to material that obviously compels him, Petterson hit upon a richer formula...
...As they leave the scene, the narrator turns to look at her grandfather "standing alone with the baron’s empty glass in his hand, and for a moment it occurred to me that he thought Jesper had meant him...
...But then, who ever looked to Scandinavia for comedy...
...He then knocks the baron to the ground and continues to berate his son, but Magnus pulls Jesper out of the bar...
...Though "a man full of wrath" given to monthly drinking binges that sometimes leave him lying in a ditch covered in his own vomit, he and his horse commanded the awe of his granddaughter and her older brother, Jesper...
...His fourth, In the Wake, marked his debut here in 2003...
...To Siberia is a plotless series of fragmentary remembrances that convey the story of a dissolving family...
...After a fisherman takes her back from the rendezvous point under the cover of night, she confesses: “I still don’t know the fisherman’s name, or if he’s still alive, but I let him use my body that night in his boat...
...He is no mere entertainer...
...The two come to drunken blows, and Jesper rushes in and climbs on the baron's back...
...Petterson’s great talent, amply displayed in Out Stealing Horses, is crafting set pieces...
...The mêlée is broken up by Magnus, who enters by surprise only to be mocked by his father: "Well, if it isn't our joinermastermaster-joiner," says the drunken old man...
...Tradition—"how people do things and have done them always"— is observed in minute detail...
...Jesper, by now working as a printer, joins the resistance...
...Modernity, technology and "ideas" are regarded with suspicion and identified with superficiality...
...She sneaks into a bar with Jesper where a girlfriend of his shows her how to wear lipstick...
...Isn't it warm enough at home...
...Their occupation of Denmark did not result in the carnage they delivered elsewhere in Europe...
...Even the loss of the narrator’s virginity is coordinated with Jesper’s departure...
...It gave me no pleasure, but he didn’t say ‘No thanks,’ and then that was done with...
...I don'tdrink with any toy baron," the grandfather replies...
...Last year he won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award as well as international critical acclaim for his fifth novel, Out Stealing Horses...
...On discovering that she is pregnant, her parents disown her...
...She steals away to deliver Jesper food and accompanies him to a rendezvous with the boat that will carry him and Ruben to the safety of Sweden...
...Thin ideas and something they call humor, everything has to be a laugh now...
...Its narrator is an unnamed 60-year-old Danish woman, and its three parts relate episodes in her adolescence before, during, and just after the Nazi occupation of Denmark...
...After the suicide, Jesper emerges as the most dynamic presence in his sister's life...
...The latter novel’s 67-year-old protagonist, however, also relates the details of his life in 1999 and fills in some of the five-decade gap between his memories and the present day...
...Jesper dreams of being a smuggler and a Communist revolutionary...
...In the end, she returns home to be greeted by news of her brother’s death in Tangiers...
...The boy takes one last shot at the baron, yelling, "You're doomed...
...Throughout the novel she retains a sympathetic persona, but the way the author pushes her up each step of the coming-of-age ladder feels rote...
...He has also fallen into debt and is essentially disinherited after his father's suicide...
...They peek into the bar, where they see him exchanging taunts with Baron Biegler, a feudal squire from the island of Bangsbo who calls the oldmana "peasant farmer...
...Marie, their mother, is a grimly devout Christian with "one foot on earth andoneinheaven...
...He signals it when the narrator checks For Whom the Bell Tolls out of the library...
...That tonal dissonance lingers during the novel’s final section, which details her time in Copenhagen and Sweden following the War, working as a telephone operator and a waitress and engaging in casual affairs...
...Reviewed by Christian Lorentzen Senior editor, "Harper's" A former librarian, printer and bookseller born in 1952, Per Petterson has authored seven novels and a collection of stories...
...This portion of the novel takes on the creaky aspects of historical fiction as Petterson stretches his narrative to fit the time line of the War...
...To an American ear, Petterson's cadences immediately sound Hemingwayesque—an influence the author has acknowledged to interviewers...
...she ismostly glimpsed playing hymns on the family's moviehouse piano...
...he seeks instead to disquiet the reader and to conjure a sense of reverence—for the natural world and for the receding past...
...The prodigal son of agriculture, the good shepherd of sawdust...
...The narrator regards the German invaders with a mixture of fascination and horror—primarily the latter...
...The Danes for the most part maintained their own institutions, and 99 per cent of Denmark’s Jews are believed to have escaped the Holocaust...
...One of the novel's weaknesses is Petterson's failure to develop her character...
...Imaginative, whimsical and acutely sensitive, she speaks with an appealing humility: "The town we lived in was a provincial one at that time, in the far north of the country, almost as far as it was possible to travel from Copenhagen and still have streets to walk along...
...More dismal than the landscape itself are the lives of the children's parents...
...The nar rator saves her brother from drowning...
...She feels the first flashes of puberty...
...Memory propels his narratives...
...She kisses Ruben, the most handsome boy at her school, who happens to be a Jew...
...To Siberia is an uneven work, but in the light of the far superior Out Stealing Horses it represents what seems a necessary stage in its author’s development...
...A reader coming to the Norwegian's work for the first time would do well to keep in mind an offhand remark by that book's narrator: "You can learn a lot from films if you have a good memory, watch how people do things and have done them always, but there is not much real work in modern films, there are only ideas...
...Sadly, no other scene in T o Siberia achieves the power of the bar fight...
...She clings to this vision through the War, into her early 20s...
...He has published two novels in Norway since Out Stealing Horses, the latest tantalizingly titled I Curse the River of Time...
...Laughter is not among them...
...The incident is at once dour and trite...
...By the novel’s end, each of the three men she cares for—grandfather, Magnus, and Jesper—will have met his own doom...
...Enter the Nazis...
...Petterson's books are bleak and fatalistic, yet they do afford certain pleasures...
...Magnus, their father, though possessed of powerful arms and a muted affection for his children, has been rendered a hunchback by his work as a carpenter...
...Originally published in 1996, To Siberia, his third novel, is the latest of his works to appear in this country...
...What's he doing out so late with practically the whole of his family...
...But we had earthworks going back 200 years and a shipyard with more than a hundred workers and a lunchbreak siren that could be heard all over the town at noon...
...The grown woman taking lovers after the War seems not much different than the nine-year-old chasing carriages around the dreary village with her older brother...
...Petterson has said her background is loosely based on that of his late mother...
...In the novel's most stunning scene, the narrator recalls the night she and her brother secretly followed their grandfather to an inn nearby...
...Near the beginning of To Siberia the narrator's paternal grandfather, a farmer who rides around the village on a black horse called Lucifer, hangs himself in his cowshed...
...Like this novel, Out Stealing Horses is narrated by an elderly Scandinavian fixated on the events of the 1940s...
...The narrator of To Siberia reveals nothing about her life beyond 1948, except that, unlike her brother, she survived...
...We had a harbor for fishing boats where the throbbing of the trawlers' motors never stopped...
...Riots and sabotage finally erupt on August 29, 1943...
...His no-nonsense suicide note reads, "I cannot go on any longer...
...He tells his sister of his plan to live eventually in Morocco, and she, inspired by a picture book, harbors a parallel fantasy of moving to Siberia: "One day I would travel from Moscow to Vladivostok on that train___I wanted open skies that were cold and clear, where it was easy to breathe and easy to see for long distances...
...But I hate being entertained I don't have any time for it...
Vol. 91 • September 2008 • No. 5
