- Shopping Bag ( 0 items )
Want a NOOK? Explore Now
“Reading a Petterson novel is like falling into a northern landscape painting—all shafts of light and clear palpable chill.” —Time
Fans of Per Petterson’s other books in English will be delighted by this opportunity to observe Arvid Jansen in his youth from a fresh perspective. In It’s Fine By Me, Arvid befriends a boy named Audun. On Audun’s first day of school he refuses to talk or take off his sunglasses; there are stories he would prefer to keep to himself. Audun lives with his mother in a working-class district of Oslo. He delivers newspapers and talks for hours about Jack London and Ernest Hemingway with Arvid. But he’s not sure that school is the right path for him and feels that life holds other possibilities. Sometimes tender, sometimes brutal, It’s Fine By Me is a brilliant novel from the acclaimed author of Out Stealing Horses and I Curse the River of Time.
Scandinavians must be sick and tired of everyone else in the world commenting on the darkness of their literature, the melancholy, the angst, the loneliness, the blah blah blah.
Per Petterson's books are eerie, it's true; a voice echoing across a ravine. But his characters are no more alienated than those in American or British literature. We think we hear the ringing sound of cold air; we think we feel the stab of arctic wind in our lungs; but it's modern life, here, there, and everywhere that grabs us by the throat. And while Out Stealing Horses — written in 2003, published in English in 2005 — has been Petterson's most widely read and decorated novel (he has called it a "freak accident"), they are all unforgettable.
Audun Sletten is thirteen in 1965, when Petterson's It's Fine By Me opens. He is working class and proud of it: the son of a quiet, opera-loving mother and a brute of an alcoholic father, who, thank god, has gone to live and drink himself to death in the woods. His sister Kari is four years older and has fallen in with a charmer whom Audun nicknames James Dean, or "JD." Nicknames are classic Petterson — he sneaks a reader into his world with codes, references, nicknames, until we share Audun's likes and dislikes — his outrage and his claustrophobia:
I am tired, I still have homework to do and a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach tells me something at school is not going the right way. What I do, I do well enough. What I hear, I remember and understand, I am not an idiot, but it's as if the rest of my class has taken off on some journey they forgot to tell me about, as if there is a secret pact between teacher and students that does not include me.Audun's brother Egil, two years older, has just died after driving JD's car into a river, and Audun is haunted but too imbued with teenage cool to speak of it to anyone. Audun's best friend is Arvid, a character who appears in most of Petterson's books, so often that the writer calls him "my stunt man" in interviews. Arvid is the voice of reason, also from a working-class home but a home full of books. Vietnam rages in the background, and Arvid tries gently to pull Audun into the local chapter of the anti-imperialist NLF party. Audun is not a joiner, but like his friend he is a reader, familiar with the work of anti-colonialist economist Jan Myrdal, Maksim Gorky, and above all, that great chronicler of lost boyhood, lost nature, lost human nature — Jack London.
Reviewer: Susan Salter Reynolds
Per Petterson won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his novel Out Stealing Horses, which has been translated into more than thirty languages and was named a Best Book of 2007 by The New York Times.
Overview
“Reading a Petterson novel is like falling into a northern landscape painting—all shafts of light and clear palpable chill.” —Time
Fans of Per Petterson’s other books in English will be delighted by this opportunity to observe Arvid Jansen in his youth from a fresh perspective. In It’s Fine By Me, Arvid befriends a boy named Audun. On Audun’s first day of school he refuses to talk or take off his sunglasses; there are stories he would prefer to keep to himself. Audun lives with ...