Per Petterson
Per Petterson
Per Pettersonis a Norwegian novelist. His debut book was Aske i munnen, sand i skoa, a collection of short stories. He has since published a number of novels to good reviews. To Siberia, set in the Second World War, was published in English in 1998 and nominated for the Nordic Council's Literature Prize. I kjølvannet, translated as In the Wake, is a young man's story of losing his family in the Scandinavian Star ferry disaster in 1990; it won the...
NationalityNorwegian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth18 July 1952
CountryNorway
To say that a family is happy I think is to diminish it, taking out what is interesting. Growing up, I don't think my family was any happier or unhappier than anyone else's. My mother and father should have been divorced or never even married. On the other hand, I remember many moments of happiness.
A dead dog is more quiet than a house on the steppes, a chair in a empty room.
If I just concentrate I can walk into memory's store and find the right shelf with the right film and disappear into it....
Time is important to me now, I tell myself.Not that it should pass quickly or slowly, but only be time, be something I live inside and fill with physical things and activities that I can divide it up by. so that it grows distict to me and does not vanish when I am not looking.
You decide for yourself when it will hurt.
But that's life. That's what you learn from; when things happen. Especially at your age. You just have to take it in and remember to think afterwards and not forget and never grow bitter.
One of my many horrors is to become the man with the frayed jacket and unfastened flies standing at the Co-op counter with egg on his shirt and more too because the mirror in the hall has given up the ghost. A shipwrecked man without an anchor in the world except in his own liquid thoughts where time has lost its sequence.
...when it came to dying, I was scared. Not of being dead, that I could not comprehend, to be nothing was impossible to grasp and therefore really nothing to be scared of, but the dying itself I could comprehend, the very instant when you know that now comes what you have always feared, and you suddenly realise that every chance of being the person you really wanted to be, is gone for ever, and the one you were, is the one those around you will remember.
I write about families. That is who we are.
In a household tragedy, you are very much aware of being alone. It is something that is possible to grasp, and that is why it hurts so much. Because you are alone. I know a little about this.
I worked in a bookstore in Oslo, importing the English-language books.
A lot can change because you are embarrassed by something.