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.


Arvid Jansen is in a tailspin, unable to process the grief of losing his parents and brothers in a tragic ferry accident. He spends his time drinking, falling into fleeting relationships with women, and driving around in his Mazda. A year ago, his wife Turid took their three daughters and left him. When Turid unexpectedly calls for a ride home from the train station, he faces the life they’ve made without him.

Now in paperback, Per Petterson’s latest novel, which has been hailed by critics as the equal of his international best seller Out Stealing Horses, explores Arvid’s dark night of the soul. In this moment of faltering hope and despair, his daughter Vigdis—who he’s always felt understood him best—has a crisis of her own and reaches out to him. 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 major international writer.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644450970
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	07/11/2023
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	411,092
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Per Petterson is the author of eight novels, including I Refuse and Out Stealing Horses, which has been translated into fifty languages. Petterson has received the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Award. He lives in Norway.

Ingvild Burkey is a Norwegian author and translator. Her published works include two volumes of poetry, a novel, a collection of short prose, and, most recently, a book of stories. She was educated at Yale University and now lives with her family in Oslo.

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

12/13/2021

Petterson’s bracing latest captures the rhythms and anomie of grief with another story featuring Arvid Jansen, protagonist of In the Wake. A year after a passenger ferry catches fire, resulting in the deaths of Arvid’s parents and two brothers along with 155 others, his wife, Turid leaves him. Arvid wanders aimlessly, driving around Oslo and often sleeping in his beloved old Mazda. A successful writer, he can’t summon the will to pick up a pen. The time he’s allotted every other week with his three daughters, Vigdis and Tone and Tine, is especially painful for the eldest, 12-year-old Vigdis, who gets into a fit during a camping trip with Arvid after confiding about Turid’s own unhappiness. Petterson’s downbeat prose has a rhythm and flow both transparent and immediate, fueled by Arvid’s eloquence and failure to focus beyond the current moment. As deep as the well of his loneliness and sadness is, his emergence on the other side is equally gratifying. Arvid’s few stray words on the disastrous fire convey its monumental effect on him. This low-key outing will particularly resonate with the author’s fans. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 12/01/2021

Introduced as a 12-year-old in Petterson's debut novel, Echoland, which is being published concurrently with this title and appearing in the United States for the first time, Arvid Jansen is now 38 years old and a successful writer attempting to navigate life in the midst of several crises. A divorced father of three, he tries to be part of his daughters' lives but often falls short. His ex-wife, who he had known since he was 19, left him for "colorful" people unlike himself. More shockingly, Arvid's parents and brothers died in a fire on a ship just a year earlier. In coming to terms with these events, Arvid drinks too much and indulges in one-night stands, finding that he can fall asleep only in his car, his beloved champagne-colored Mazda. Much of his day is spent taking buses, trains, and taxis around Oslo, visiting places that resonate with him, including the neighborhood where he grew up and the shoe factory where his father worked. Slowly, Arvid begins to realize that he is being tested by the women in his life and must meet their expectations. VERDICT Petterson has written a beautifully nuanced, deeply felt, and powerful story of survival.—Jacqueline Snider, Toronto

Library Journal

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