I Curse the River of Time: Book summary and reviews of I Curse the River of Time by Per Petterson

I Curse the River of Time Summary

It is 1989: Communism is crumbling, and Arvid Jansen, thirty-seven, is facing his first divorce. At the same time, his mother gets diagnosed with cancer. Over a few intense autumn days, we follow Arvid as he struggles to find a new footing in his life while all the established patterns around him are changing at staggering speed. I Curse the River of Time is an honest, heartbreaking yet humorous portrayal of a complicated mother-son relationship told in Per Petterson’s precise and beautiful prose.

I Curse the River of Time Reviews

"Starred Review...Petterson blends enough hope with the gorgeously evoked melancholy to come up with a heartbreaking and cautiously optimistic work." - Publishers Weekly

"The atmosphere...is as gray as the stark Norwegian landscape. Melancholy permeates every character like a dense Oslo fog. Yet, this author's gift is his ability to convey so much emotion in such a spare prose style." - Library Journal

"A bleak but involving novel that will appeal to readers of character-driven literary fiction." - Booklist

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I Curse the River of Time Reader Reviews

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Rated of 5 by Aprile G
Haunting and engrossing
I have no idea how Per Petterson crams so much lyrical emotion into his short books; but it's nothing short of miraculous. I felt that I instantly knew his characters from their first words--somehow all the longing and self-deception is crystal clear, embedded in long, flat sentences that always leave their mark long after I've read them. I almost never read books more than once, but both I Curse the River of Time, and Out Stealing Horses are keepers to go back to again and again.

Per Petterson Author Biography

Photo: Torunn Nilsen

Per Petterson, born in Oslo, Norway in 1952, worked for several years as an unskilled labourer, trained as a librarian, and worked as a bookseller, writer, and translator before publishing his first work, Aske i munnen, sand i skoa (Ash In His Mouth, Sand In His Shoe), a volume of short stories, in 1987. This book was proclaimed one of the decade's most sensational debuts.

Since then he has written a book of essays and several novels that have established his reputation as one of Norway's most significant fiction writers. These are Ekkoland (1989), Det er greit for meg (1992), To Siberia (1996), In the Wake (2000), Out Stealing Horses (2003), Månen over Porten (2004), and I Curse the River of Time (Jeg forbanner tidens...