Per Petterson

On a whim, really, I took up Per Petterson's I Curse the River of Time - and I have to say, I'm glad I did.

This isn't a perfect book, but there's plenty to like, including Petterson's sensitivity to - you guessed it - the passing of time. 

Petterson's novel focuses on the various stages of our lives and our attempts to recreate (or locate) moments past. These moments needn't be epic in nature: indeed, for every wall that falls, or every regime that changes, there are thousands of lives lived - millions of interactions worth remembering. 

That seems to be one of Petterson's points: against the backdrop of European history at the end of the 1980s, he casts a faint light upon the experiences of one family. And he does so, I think, with considerable success. 

I didn't love Petterson's prose, but I think that he's come close in this book to uncovering that junction between memory and nostalgia. Everything here is coated with a thin layer of regret. The trick is to transform that sorrow into something else, something more like contentment with the present. The past will always elude us. 

The last word is reserved for Petterson:

"...all the summers were gone, and not only because I had forgotten them after twenty-five years, but because there was no longer any point remembering them."