Rate this book

Jeg Forbanner Tidens Elv (2008)

by Per Petterson(Favorite Author)

3.36 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

8249505956 (ISBN13: 9788249505951)

languge

English

genre

Historical Fiction

publisher

Oktober

review 1: Norwegian author Per Petterson's novel, I Curse The River Of Time, is a satisfying read from start to finish. (Three and a half stars is my actual rating, but I still don't know how to make that half star -- someone help me out here, please.) Books in translation, though usually wonderful stories, rarely evoke subtleties of deeply felt feelings and emotion the way this one does. Those shared but sometimes untranslatable shades of our humanity are generally lost.This is a story of a 37 year old man and his mother, a fiercely independent mother, diagnosed with cancer, who Avrid Jansen both loves and hates. It is also a story of Jansen's love for his wife, from their innocent, languid beginnings (languid like a slow moving river) to the present where their marriage has disso... morelved.Petterson skillfully transports the reader back and forth across "the river of time" in the early years of the marriage, but the novel is mostly concerned with the strained relationship between mother and son, as he relates several trying episodes of their early home life together and present animosities between them as well. To a friend of hers, she has this to say about her son when her friend asks if he would like to come inside to join them instead of sitting out in the car: "He's not coming inside. He's thirty-seven years old, but I wouldn't call him a grown-up. That would be an exaggeration. He's getting a divorce. I don't know what to do with him."A metaphor of several ferry crossings between Denmark and Norway bring to life the essence of time in the narrative, and the thought provoking title itself comes from two lines of a poem written by Mao Zedong: "Fragile images of departure, the village back then,I curse the river of time; thirty-two years have passed."A gentle, though sometimes startling book which makes me wonder about the strength of the relationship and intimacy between author and co-translator, Charlotte Barslund (Petterson is listed as translator as well) to have so artlessly rendered the nuances of pathos from the original Norwegian into English the way they've done. In the last few pages, Avrid walks out onto a beach in Norway with his resolute but ailing mother. She heads off alone while he lies down on a sand dune to contemplate death in the abstract, the way any young man would when faced with the knowledge of a parent's mortality and how that mortality relates to himself: “I could comprehend the very instant when you know that now comes what you have always feared, and you suddenly realise that every chance of being the person you really wanted to be, is gone for ever, and the one you were, is the one those around you will remember.”Like any good work of literature, much of the plot is left unresolved, evoking that sadness, that wonderful, usually untranslatable pathos right up to the end.
review 2: I really struggled finishing this book. The atmosphere was okay and the feeling was successfully transmitted to the reader. However, I could not connect with the main character, Arvid, at all. I don't know if it's some scandinavian thing, but I really was bored throughout the book and all the seemingly "meaningful" stories and memories of this Arvid guy made no sense to me and I was not interested at all. *from here on, there are spoilers*The book goes back and forward in time with memories of A. with his mother and their rather dull relationship. The mother obviously doesn't like him as much as the other sons, because of no deep reason, but because A. is such a loser. He is such a loser in all aspects of life: his marriage, his career thrown away because of some stupid ideology that made him believe he could change the world by becoming a blue-collar labourer and convincing other workers. DUH! Needless to say, he fails to even talk about his ideals with these lower-class people, who naturally care only about earning their daily bread. Then and now we learn how disappointed the mother is with the son, and how distant she always is to him. The mother has terminal cancer and the whole book you kind of know that in the end she will die and something will happen that will somehow "make" the book. But no - she dies right after they talk and Arvid leaves. He sees the mother die from distance and does nothing but watch and eat grass?? What the fuck?! Is this the fucking ending? Should I have derived like a "deep" meaning from all this? Sorry but literally "nothing" happens in this book. Not even anything exists that one might derive meaning from. Just a really, really dull book with good narration. less

Download links for: Jeg forbanner tidens elv

Advertising