But something had happened, nothing hung together any more, all things had spaces, had distances between them, like satellites, attracted to and pushed away at the same instant, and it would take immense willpower to cross those spaces, those distances, much more than I had available, much more than I had the courage to use.
The title of this book comes from a poem written by Mao Zedong, a passage here translated as:
Arvid was a militant Marxist, even causing a rift between his mother and himself when he decided to drop out of college to join the peuple at a factory job; a job just like the ones his parents both toiled at and hoped their son could avoid through education. With a picture of Chairman Mao hung proudly above his sofa between Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan, Arvid thought that Mao's poetry captured his own essence, as interpreted by this passage:Fragile images of departure, the village back then.I curse the river of time; thirty-two years have passed.
(T)ime without warning could catch up with me and run around beneath my skin like tiny electric shocks and I could not stop them, no matter how much I tried. And when they let up at last and everything fell quiet, I was already a different person than I had been before, and it sometimes made me despair.It was very interesting to me, therefore, to read in this article that the poem above is considered a poor translation, and the passage more properly says:
The difference between cursing the passing of time and cursing the past itself is apparently crucial (according to this article's writer, André Alexis; a perceptive author whom I admire) to understanding both Mao and Arvid, leading to the conclusion: As a result, Arvid isn't so much an unreliable narrator as he is a bewildered one. Bewildered pretty much captures it. The meandering and unfocussed nature of the reminiscences are mirrored in the frequently long and jam-packed sentences:Like a dim dream recalled, I curse the long-fled past -My native soil two and thirty years gone by.
My father’s brothers with their wives did call on rare occasions and every other Christmas my mother’s childless sister came up from Copenhagen acting upper class with her husband who worked in a firm importing French cars and was the creepy owner of an 8mm camera he used for all kinds of things, and my grandparents would also come, their palms worn and hard, from another, more puritanical town in the same country, in the same fashion, by ferry, grey hair, grey clothes, standing windswept and grey on the quay waiting for my father to come down along Trondhjemsveien in a rare taxi to pick them up and sometimes I, too, was in that taxi and they looked so small next to their big suitcases.As Arvid skips from present to past (all written in the future), I was often amused to notice him writing omnisciently about his mother's narrative – describing her thoughts and actions for times when he was not present and couldn't possibly have that level of detail about – and then always inserting himself into these passages by sharing his own feelings or judgements. At its core, I Curse the River of Time is about Arvid's attempt to get closer to his mother, even as he can't bring himself to say the words he wants to say; to invoke the titular river again, Arvid imagines the gulf between himself and his mother as the uncrossable Rio Grande (and in a blackly comedic reminiscence, he once tried to explain that to her – a long time ago – with disastrous results). It's uncomfortable to watch Arvid try to approach his mother – to be inside his agonised head – and to see him acting like a child and falling into the frigid water and getting into barroom fights and needing to have his fares and hotel rooms paid for, and know his mother doesn't want him there; didn't need to have him follow her from Norway to Denmark without an invitation. Arvid was the only one of four sons to look like their father (which he resented as a further distancing from the their mother), the only child who had been wanted and planned for (which he resented, again, as distancing), and in all of his memories, he had the most special connection with his mother: the one who shared with her a love of literature and films (even if in the end he was just forgetting when another brother would be present at the cinema with them); the one who would sneak out of bed after their father left for work in the morning in order to have alone time with Mom. Despite spending a lifetime reaching out, Arvid believes:
She did not pay attention, she turned her gaze to other things. She saw me come in and didn’t know where I had been, she saw me go out and didn’t know where I was heading, how adrift I was, how 16 I was without her, how 17, how 18.As a result, he's a man who never grew up, even now facing a divorce from a woman who was shockingly younger than Arvid when they first got together – and I suppose the inference is that she eventually did grow up; outgrew a husband who squeezes his eyes shut in order to avoid having a hard conversation with her. In a nice parallel scene, the book ends with Arvid watching his mother watch the ocean from her knees on a freezing Danish beach:
I lay like this for a few moments to see if she would stand up, but she didn't. I crawled back and leaned against the mound, squeezed my eyes shut and tried to concentrate. I was searching for something very important, a very special thing, but no matter how hard I tried, I could not find it. I pulled some straws from a cluster of marram grass and put them in my mouth and started chewing. They were hard and sharp and cut my tongue, and I took more, a fistful, and stuffed them in my mouth and chewed them while I sat there, waiting for my mother to stand up and come to me.Don't you just want to smack Arvid and tell him to grow up already? I Curse the River of Time is literature as art, and as such it may not be for all tastes, but I found it to be brutal and honest and emotional and just so very, very well crafted. Author Per Petterson is a master (which I should have remembered since I loved Out Stealing Horses once upon a time) and I'll be moving him up on my list of authors to devour.
