Présentation de l'éditeur
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.
Revue de presse
Per Petterson is a profoundly gifted novelist ―
Richard Ford
Tight-lipped with one another, his characters open their hearts to the reader, making us witnesses to their most private selves. He makes the reader lean in, out of the wind, to listen closely.... Petterson has the ability to be simultaneously restrained and terribly tender...Extraordinary skill... There is a quality that I can only call charm, or something like charm, to Petterson's essentially dark and lonely sensibility. ―
New York Times
Petterson applies candour, sensitivity and humour to his intimate studies of life as lived by us, the ordinary majority, and the result is singular magic...resoundingly human...All the inevitability of life, its fragile glue and the doubts that stalk the survivors are summoned and considered in Petterson's candid, allusive fiction. There is no easy sentiment, only genuine emotional power...Tender, masterfully evocative ―
Irish Times
Spare, cool, precise prose...a powerful evocation of the difficulty of communication within families ―
Evening Standard
I Curse the River of Time is a work of blackest tragicomedy, a novel as cold and scintillating and desolate as the northern winter landscapes that are its setting. -- Rachel Cusk ―
Guardian
Biographie de l'auteur
Per Petterson was born in Oslo in 1952 and worked for several years as an unskilled labourer and a bookseller. He has received the prestigious Nordic Council Literature Prize and, on multiple occasions, the Brage Prize, the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature and the Booksellers' Best Book of the Year Award for his many celebrated novels, such as
In the Wake,
I Curse the River of Time and
I Refuse. Petterson made his literary breakthrough in 2003 with
Out Stealing Horses, which in English translation won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. It has been published in fifty languages and was an international bestseller.
Charlotte Barslund translates Scandinavian novels and plays. Her recent work includes
Calling Out For You by Karin Fossum,
Machine by Peter Adolphsen and
The Pelican by August Strindberg.
