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Journalism of Courage
Per Petterson wasn’t content to simply thank his mother and father as he accepted one of the world’s richest book prizes. He kept on talking about them until he was nearly halfway through his seven-page speech.
Petterson was little known outside his native Norway before his novel Out Stealing Horses won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in June. The 55-year-old writer had beaten out finalists Cormac McCarthy, J.M. Coetzee, Julian Barnes and Jonathan Safran Foer for the 2007 prize, the richest for the best single work of fiction published in English anywhere in the world.
Out Stealing Horses is the story of a 67-year-old man, living alone, who is haunted by the memory of a boyhood summer with his father. It was not directly inspired by Petterson’s own family history. Yet family is its focus, and his two previous novels hit so close to home that he couldn’t have published them if his mother and father were still alive. Their end was shocking. On April 7, 1990, Petterson got a call from his ex-wife, who told him to turn on the TV. He saw images of a ferryboat in flames: 159 people died, among them his parents and two of his three brothers.
In Dublin, Petterson talked about the beautifully carved bookcase his father once bought, its shelves stocked with the previous owner’s books. And about his mother, who owned not a single book herself but borrowed from the library and read so constantly “that I never saw her sleep.” Both his parents worked in factories, he says, “my mother in a chocolate factory and my father in a shoe factory.”
Petterson’s first book was a collection of autobiographical stories “about this father and this boy,” but though it was published three years before the ferry fire, his father never mentioned it. By 18, Petterson knew that all he wanted was to write. There was a problem, though: he couldn’t finish anything.
“I was a coward,” he says. “If I finished a story, I could see it was no good.” But he was miserable not writing. One day in 1986, a regular customer—an editor at the publishing house Oktober—gave Petterson a push. “You are halfway in your life now,” he remembers the editor telling him. Petterson went home and finished a story. Within a year, he had published his first collection. The stories featured a character named Arvid Jansen, a version of himself Petterson calls his “soul mate”.
Meanwhile, Out Stealing Horses has been showing up on best-of-the-year lists, among them Time magazine’s and as one of the top five in the New York Times’.
Petterson is already 200 pages into another Arvid Jansen book “about him and his mother. ” “All I ever think about,” he says, “is families.”
-Bob Thompson(LAT-WP)
