It's Fine By Me: Summary and book reviews of It's Fine By Me by Per Petterson, plus links to an excerpt from It's Fine By Me and a biography of Per Petterson.
It's Fine By Me
by Per Petterson
Hardcover: Oct 2012,
208 pages.
Paperback: 24 Sep 2013,
208 pages.
Fans of Per Petterson's other books in English will be delighted by this opportunity to observe Arvid Jansen in his youth from a fresh perspective. In It's Fine By Me, Arvid befriends a boy named Audun. On Audun's first day of school he refuses to talk or take off his sunglasses; there are stories he would prefer to keep to himself. Audun lives with his mother in a working-class district of Oslo. He delivers newspapers and talks for hours about Jack London and Ernest Hemingway with Arvid. But he's not sure that school is the right path for him and feels that life holds other possibilities.
Sometimes tender, sometimes brutal, It's Fine By Me is a brilliant novel from the acclaimed author of Out Stealing Horses and I Curse the River of Time.
In his novel It’s Fine by Me, Per Petterson uses the shared-yet-unique loneliness [all humans experience] as the foundation for characters who are so vulnerable, so real, so beautifully complex, you ache for them. (Reviewed by Elena Spagnolie).
Publisher's Weekly
Petterson's achievement in this work lies in conveying the passionate alienation of a young man caught between a childish need for protection and a powerful desire to protect.
Library Journal
With biting humor and sharp, Hemingway-like prose, this bildungsroman offers more light and hope than later Petterson novels, perhaps reflecting the author's younger, more idealistic self. Perfect for YA crossover or an intergenerational book discussion.
Kirkus Reviews
We have met Audun before, in different settings; he's the alienated young Westerner, and Petterson hasn't done enough to individuate him.
The Guardian (UK) It's Fine By Me ... convey[s] those ordinary experiences close to Petterson's heart: the pleasure, for example, in the midst of domestic strife, of slowly and very carefully rolling a good cigarette, brewing the perfect coffee and settling down on the sofa with a fine book, like this one.
The Scotsman It's Fine By Me is many things - an engaging coming-of-age tale, a writer's halting journey and a story of family drama and the inevitable stages of grief. With Audun Sletten Petterson has created a hero with gutsy resilience and a nose for the truth of things. You'd like to meet him on a street in your own home town.
In It's Fine By Me, on his first day at Veitvet School in 1965, 13-year-old Audun Sletten meets Arvid Jansen – a young man who would become his best, and one of his only, friends. "A few girls were skipping rope, and coming straight towards me was a boy on crutches… I glanced left and right, but there was no one else by the fence. He had dark, curly hair and boots like mine, with KINKS written on the one and HOLLIES on the other… I had decided not to make friends with anyone at this school, but this bloke was hard to refuse."
Though he plays a secondary role to Audun in It's Fine By Me, Arvid Jansen will be familiar to Per Petterson fans; he has starred in four of the author's other works, each of which describes the character's life at a different stage, from the tender age of six all the way through his late thirties.
In Petterson's debut, a collection of short stories entitled Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes (Aske I munnen, san I skoa, 1987), we meet six-year-old Arvid who...
An engrossing and thoroughly contemporary novel on what it means to be young, alive, and conscious in these first decades of the new century.
These are 2 of the 7 readalike suggestions for It's Fine By Me. Members have full access to all readalikes. If you are a member, please login. To find out more about membership, click here.
A very large book - in number of pages and in content - and every page worth reading. Thoroughly enjoyed this one and her first book on the...
read more
Two Lives is a memoir written by international best-selling author, Vikram Seth. In this interesting and engaging book, Seth writes about his great...
read more
Z, the novel about the life of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald is at points charming and; like another reviewer, I kept thinking of the movie, "Midnight...
read more
Judge rules unused Borders gift cards to be worthless(May 23 2013) Borders owes nothing to holders of roughly $210.5 million of gift cards that had not been used by the time the bookstore chain shut down, a Manhattan federal...
Full Story
BookBrowse
(1248 words).
Publisher's Weekly
