Perfectly Norwegian

Norweigan author Per Petterson’s star has been rising slowly for some time now, but it picked up considerable speed last year when his novel Out Stealing Horses landed on The New York Times’ Ten Best Books of the Year list. Petterson could probably have used the Times coup to leverage his way into a more lucrative book deal with another publisher, but chose instead to stick with St. Paul’s Graywolf Press for the publication of his latest release, To Siberia.

To Siberia was originally published in Norweigan in 1996 and saw its first English translation in England in 1998, but Graywolf is the book’s first U.S. publisher. Fans of Out Stealing Horses will recognize the lean, matter-of-fact prose and closely observed layers of detail, but To Siberia is a very different book from Out Stealing Horses.

For starters, it’s told in the first-person voice of a young girl, beginning when she is seven and through her teenage years until she grows into a young woman. At the center of the young narrator’s life is her brother, Jesper, with whom she shares all sorts of tragedies and adventures growing up largely unsupervised in a small town in the northernmost part of Denmark. Until the village is taken over by Nazis, and her brother, a communist insurgent, flees, leaving her behind.

This is not a war book, but it takes place against the backdrop of World War II, and the characters are all affected by the Nazi invasion in one way or another even though there isn’t much fighting to speak of in their little village. The title, To Siberia, refers to the imagined adventures of a young girl whose life does not unfold the way she had planned or hoped, and whose childhood dreams are no match for the unforgiving reality that becomes her life.

To Siberia, by Per Petterson Graywolf Press, St. Paul, 2008, 256 pages, $22