Men in My Situation: A Novel

by Per Petterson

Overview

A tender, merciless portrait of a life going to pieces by the internationally acclaimed author of Out Stealing Horses.

Men in My Situation, Per Petterson’s evocative and moving new novel, finds Arvid Jansen in a tailspin, unable to process the grief of losing his parents and brothers in a tragic ferry accident. In the aftermath, Arvid’s wife, Turid, divorced him and took their three daughters with her. One year later, Arvid still hasn’t recovered. He spends his time drinking, falling into fleeting relationships with women, and driving around in his Mazda. When Turid unexpectedly calls for a ride home from the train station, he has to face the life they’ve made without him.

Critics have already hailed Men in My Situation as the equal of Petterson’s international bestseller Out Stealing Horses, in part for his unflinching portrayal of Arvid’s dark night of the soul. In this moment of faltering hope and despair, Arvid’s daughter Vigdis—who he’s always felt understood him best—has a crisis of her own and reaches out. Now he must find a way to respond to someone who, after everything, still needs him. Reaching the heights of Petterson’s best work, Men in My Situation is a heartrending, indelible story from a celebrated author.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644450758
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	02/01/2022
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Per Petterson is the author of books including In the Wake, To Siberia, and I Curse the River of Time. Out Stealing Horses has won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Norwegian Booksellers' Prize. The New York Times Book Review named it one of the 10 best books of the year. A former bookseller, Petterson lives in Oslo, Norway.

Editorial Reviews

Petterson’s bracing latest captures the rhythms and anomie of grief.”—Publishers Weekly

“Petterson has written a beautifully nuanced, deeply felt, and powerful story of survival.”—Library Journal, starred review

“Per Petterson [is] a master at capturing internal tumult, family relationships and the vicissitudes of grief. . . . ‘Men in My Situation’ is possessed of an austerity and bleakness that is satisfyingly unforgiving.”—Nina Renata Aron, Los Angeles Times

“With ‘Men in My Situation,’ Petterson deepens his examination of grief by animating how a parent's loss, depression and trauma can be passed from one generation to the next. . . . . Ultimately, Petterson provides an honest portrait of how one family unravels — and hopefully is put back together again, albeit in a different configuration.” —S. Kirk Walsh, Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

“Men in My Situation [is] the best book I’ve read this summer. . . . Petterson’s writing (brilliantly rendered by translator Ingvild Burkey) slips away from you, and you watch in quiet amazement as it rises into a beyond that’s lying right there, before you, on the page.”—Cory Stockwell, The Common

“[A] beautiful, touchingly honest novel. . . . Until its final, stunning pages, Men in My Situation plays out with profound sensitivity and insight as a struggle for the soul of Arvid Jansen.”—Robert Crooke, Heavy Feather Review

From the Publisher

2021-11-17
A Norwegian writer finds himself struggling to get his life together after the double whammy of his parents' and brothers' deaths in a tragic ship fire and the end of his 15-year marriage a year later.

Arvid Jansen is a recurring character and something of an alter ego in Pettersen’s fiction. The author's parents and brother died in an actual ferry disaster in 1990; his novel In The Wake (2002) concentrates on Arvid’s relationship with his father and his guilt and grief surrounding the deaths. In the newer novel, the focus is largely on the aftermath of Arvid’s divorce from his wife, Turid, and his longing for his three young daughters, whom he now rarely sees for reasons that may be of his own making. Arvid is 43 in In The Wake, and the final section of the new novel finds him at the same age, but for most of the (in)action, which takes place over the course of one Sunday a year after Turid and the girls left, he's looking back at himself at 38. (The missing years between 38 and 43 might be another novel.) Turid calls him early that morning. Stranded and desperate, she asks for his help getting home because “I have no one else,” a statement he disbelieves. Whether his marriage’s failure was his fault remains unclear, but while dutifully helping Turid get home, and later picking up his daughters—left with a babysitter he doesn’t trust—Arvid stews over his life, reexperiencing nonchronological bits and pieces of aimlessness and missed connections. Though he's published three books and received a grant to write his big factory novel, he currently spends most of his time picking up women at bars or roaming the countryside alone in his beloved Mazda, psychologically adrift; American readers may have more trouble following the physical geography of Norway he covers exhaustively than the depressed, self-absorbed, but beautifully articulated meanderings of his mind.

A melancholy read despite a glimmer of hope toward the end.

Kirkus Reviews