Reviewed by Reese Kwon
6.13.07

Imagine a helicopter roaring, a man waking from a solitary hillside nap in the Norwegian snow. As he comes to himself, the man shivers, howls, stumbles, bumps into trees, and in other ways tries to fight off the cold. All of this is understandable; you and I, sensible reader, might do the same. But then the man thinks of what he might look like to another person, and he starts to laugh:

For I am good entertainment. I would have liked to have seen me myself and I laugh too, between my chattering teeth. Ho, ho, ho, I laugh, ho, ho, ho, and suddenly I am standing close to the nearest block. Where did that come from?

Dislocation, confusion and unexpected comedy pervade this strange and astonishing novel. In the Wake, Norwegian novelist Per Petterson’s fifth book, and the first to be made available in the United States, is a meditation on the aftereffects of loss. At the start of the novel, six years have passed since 43-year-old Arvid Jansen lost his parents and two younger brothers in a ferry fire. (The accident is modeled after a 1990 fire on the Scandinavian Star which killed 158 people, including members of Petterson’s family.) Since then, Arvid’s wife has left him and he is forbidden from seeing his daughters; he has no friends; his only and older brother is suicidal. “I am not alone,” he says. “There are people in my life although none comes to mind at this very moment.”

Fittingly, we pass much of the novel entirely in Arvid’s mind. At the start of his narration, he is standing in front of the door to a bookshop with a severe pain in his ribs, unfastened trousers, and a black eye. “I do not know how long I have been standing here,” he says. “I have been out of this world and now I am back, and I don’t feel well.” From the bookshop, he wanders towards a café, then towards his apartment, all the while drifting in memory.

Throughout the novel, Arvid continues to drift through both his physical and his mental worlds. Tenses vacillate; time slows, jumps, irrupts; Arvid is unmoored, and so are we. This is one of Petterson’s admirable achievements, to so thoroughly draw in his reader into the erratic and discursive mind of his character. As his great countryman and predecessor Knut Hamsun did in Hunger, Petterson makes the irrational not only understandable, but also rational.

So, for example, as Arvid stands in front of the bookshop, he leans his weight against the door, and he says, “I could fall asleep now, and maybe I am asleep, and dreaming, or maybe remembering a dream.” He is in his apartment, or he imagines himself in his apartment, of six years earlier. The clock is stopped. His dead family members are with him: “I know they are dead, and I know that they know, but we do not talk about it.” Arvid then looks out of the window and sees his father on the balcony below his, and he is embarrassed: “I don’t like the neighbours to see a dead man standing on the balcony sunning himself.” He closes the window, and turns away.

Arvid is unconcerned as to whether or not this is or was a dream. “I remember a lot of dreams,” he later says. “Sometimes they are hard to distinguish from what has really happened. That is not so terrible. It is the same with books.” His dream-logic and his discontinuities, his dips into the surreal and the fictional, are as real to him as his waking life. This is a wholly convincing portrayal of the logic of grief: for him, the clock has stopped since the ferry accident.

Another achievement of In the Wake is its precise and poetic language (a credit to be shared with his translator, Anne Born), as in the varying descriptions of a scene to which Arvid returns again and again, the tableau of his loss: “skin, I see skin, velvety dull in the flickering light of a lamp moving onwards, restless shadows between elbows and hips, shoulder blades and necks, a sea of hushed softness where nothing moves but the light which brings life to what is not living.” Where nothing moves but the light which brings life to what is not living: this is terrifying, exact, and, in describing a mass death, oxymoronically beautiful. Later, he recalls that the dead “lay close together in the companionways, side by side like a single conjoined body,” and later still, that his father had been “on the floor in a sea of beer, or was it blood, skin to skin with other bodies.” In such moments, Petterson’s prose, both straightforward and daedal, has the power of poetry.

As tragic as it is, In the Wake is leavened by a bitter comedy. Arvid is so detached from the world as to feel detached from himself; detachment breeds an awareness of the absurd. Unhappy with a poorly made cake, Arvid decides not to ask for his money back: “I have never complained about anything except badly written books and the world situation.”

Slowly, brief moments of contact with other human beings (a nurse, a woman across the street, an upstairs Kurdish neighbor, a daughter, a brother) and with literature (he is a stymied novelist) bring Arvid closer to a kind of recovery. He says, near the end of the book, “But I feel better now than I have for a long time. I do.” It is a testament to how profoundly immersed we have been in his consciousness that, despite his inconsistencies, we almost believe him.