To Siberia by Per Petterson: Book summary and media reviews.

"Jesper used to have great fun sneaking after the lamplighter with a similar pole he had made, and when the man in the black uniform had pulled one ring and gone on to light the next lamp, Jesper scurried out of the shadows and pulled the opposite ring. They went on like that right up to Nytorv. When the lamplighter had arrived there he always turned to contemplate his work, for he was the lord of light and darkness, and then the whole street might be pitch black."

Yet for all its meditations on that crisp line between white and black in a time of moral peril, the novel itself remains frustratingly imprecise. The story moves forward haltingly, the setting is never fully conjured and, most damningly, the first-person narrator never coalesces into a flesh-and-blood person. There are a few fine scenes—Petterson mirrors to beautiful effect two scenes in which the children stand outside peering into windows that frame distinctly adult tableaus—but they never add up, and when the novel skips ahead to the narrator's twenty-second year and her self-imposed exile in Sweden, it loses all focus and momentum. Readers who eagerly pick up this novel in the hopes of finding a worthy successor to the excellent Out Stealing Horses will be disappointed (and, in fact, this book is not a successor; it was written in 1996, translated into English in 1998, and republished now only to capitalize on Petterson's newfound literary fame). - Amy Reading.