To Siberia

Those who read this blog know just how much I love Per Petterson's novel, Out Stealing Horses, which I bought by near accident while awaiting a train, and read on the way to Manhattan and back. I had a student, then, whom I was teaching—an emergent poet. I wrote to him that evening, insisting that he read the book. K. hardly ever did a thing I suggested (he did his own thing, better). But this time he listened. This time he read. And in an email just following K.'s high school graduation he wrote, The part when Lars shoots Odd and Jon is sinking to his knees outside the house, and his father comes storming out of the forest like a giant. It's all there, I can see it so well the way it is written.

It's all there. That's the writer's job: To bring the reader right there, where everything happened. Yesterday and early this morning, as I sat reading To Siberia, another Petterson novel, I marveled over Petterson's patience—how he waits a very long time to sink the reader into this story about a young woman growing up in the hard, white cold of Jutland. The novel is, for the longest time, a sensory slide. It is reminisce and recall, and the elements are fragments, until somewhere deep into the novel the reader understands that this is the story of a sister's love for a brother who ultimately (it is war time) disappears. True, Petterson signals this early on. But he doesn't make the reader care, he doesn't make it clear that this is the place where everything happens—that the entire story will live inside this vulnerable, nearly illicit love.

So that To Siberia feels submerged and coded and then, only then (but it takes time), essential.