READING THE WORLD: Per Petterson's In the Wake

This is a guest review for Reading the World. It is by Max Magee, who runs the excellent literary blog The Millions.

I don't read enough fiction in translation, maybe a couple of books per year.  When I do the experience elicits one of two reactions.  Either the book is so rooted in its place and culture that I can't imagine it being written in another language, or the book, despite its overseas origins, shows that there are universals in literature, no matter the language in which a book was conceived.  Norwegian Per Petterson's In the Wake falls mostly into the latter camp, as it draws from the grand tradition of books about ruminating, somewhat pathetic male protagonists who appear to live their lives mostly in their heads.

Saul Bellow's Seize the Day comes to mind, and Richard Ford has made a career out of this type of book.  But my favorite example from this crowded genre is Walker Percy's pitch perfect The Moviegoer.  The book's unforgettable protagonist is Binx Bolling, a successful businessman and a member of a prominent and eccentric New Orleans family. He is unmarried and enjoys the escape that going to the movies provides.  He is unable to keep himself from dating his secretaries, and he is constantly trying to hold "despair" at bay.  It is an existential novel of the American suburbs where Binx tries to find meaning or hope in the midst of mundanity.  But it isn't preachy or didactic, it meanders and searches, and one begins to wonder if Binx is a madman and not just a lonely bachelor.

That boundary between madness and loneliness is plumbed to great effect by Petterson in In the Wake, and is heightened by the Scandanavian backdrop of icy roads and unadorned apartment blocks.  The book opens with Petteron's ruminating, somewhat pathetic male protagonist Arvid Jansen regaining lucidity leaning against the door of a bookstore.  Arvid is bruised and battered though he knows not why.

What follows is Arvid's slow steps toward awareness and a tentative investigation of memory.  Petterson deftly mimics Arvid's mental state as the prose grows increasingly crisp after the foggy opening.  In a sense, it is a tale of breakdown and recovery in which the reader joins the action near Arvid's rock bottom.  But his path towards stability isn't falsely uplifting -- or uplifting at all really -- instead Petterson delivers the creeping return to normalcy that happens after someone falls apart.

The triggers for Arvid's troubles are many: half his family died in a terrible accident; he is divorced; he has failed at his career.  But these facts, explored mostly in hazy flashback, are less interesting than the exploration of Arvid's character and the confused, almost random steps of Arvid setting forth toward the rest of his life.

Despite Arvid's connection to the many bewildered middle-aged males of fiction, the freshness of the Scandanavian perspective and the precision of Petterson's prose (and Anne Born's translation), wavering between a chilly fog and crystalline clarity, make the book worth reading.

-- Max Magee

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