To Siberia, by Per Petterson, has a puzzling reputation. It is clearly a stronger novel than Petterson’s international hit, Out Stealing Horses. Yet it was the latter book that garnered international attention, winning the 2007 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for best work of fiction published in English, and appearing on practically every international newspaper’s best-book-of-the-year list. I must admit that I was disappointed by Out Stealing Horses. Seduced by the hype surrounding this book, I was left with a compelling but inconsistent portrayal of Norwegian domestic country life. So I approached To Siberia with trepidation, only to conclude by marveling at the mysteries of book publishing and marketing. For To Siberia — and not Out Stealing Horses — is one of the most thought-provoking and cohesive books I’ve read in the past few years.

To Siberia was originally released in Norway in 1996, four years before Petterson’s novel In The Wake, and seven years before Out Stealing Horses. Whereas both Out Stealing Horses and In the Wake offer a male perspective replete with chain saws, shotguns and remnants of wives’ make-up on the bathroom shelf, To Siberia is a portrait of a woman. This woman is an unusual narrator. She has no name, is of indeterminate age, and seems to live outside of all contemporary contextualization. She is a disembodied voice exposing a past, a narrative beginning at the age of seven and continuing into the woman’s twenty-third year. The past has undeniably had a profound impact on this indeterminate woman (why else would she be telling it?). Yet the reader is left in limbo. On one hand, Petterson provides us with an intimate, painful account of this woman’s life; no detail is spared to preserve her dignity. But there is also an insurmountable divide between the temporality of the narrated past and access to the narrator herself. Take this passage, for example:

The food all came up again because it had been too long since I last ate anything. I watched the day changing through the window on to the courtyard where the shadows rose and fell, rose and fell in a system I could not make out, because sometimes it was quick and sometimes slow, and I have a photograph that Aunt Kari sent me several years later.

Present and past may be conflated, yet it is the past that defines the narrative voice. In one respect, this form of narration defies quantifiable time; the present is an unknown subsidiary of the past. This question, then, followed me throughout the book: who is this “present” narrator and what similarity does she have to her past self?

I cannot answer that question. I know that. I am left floundering in those sixteen years, a time period encompassing the outbreak of World War II and the Nazi arrival in the narrator’s small Danish village. I am left with an unpredictable, although stylistically consistent voice that offhandedly inserts important, often devastating facts into the narrative. The narrator’s brother, Jesper, figuratively dies early on in one simple, backward-looking sentence — “he has been dead more than half my life” — yet the narrative continues, with a very-much-alive Jesper in tow. The narrator’s world functions according to these terms; people die, landscapes change, and opportunities are lost in the same breath as milk is delivered and drinks poured. It is a precarious and terrifying existence where sexual maturity, Nazism, death, and travel are comingled.

The narration of To Siberia unfolds against a backdrop of loss, as the novel both begins and ends with death. The first death occurs in a self-consciously literary manner: Jesper announces to the narrator, “Jesus Christ, Grandfather has hanged himself in the cowshed!” Later in the chapter, their grandfather proceeds to commit suicide. This death triggers a ceaseless catalogue of loss. In fact, death seems to be the default state in To Siberia; drowning, mysterious illness, suicide and Nazi brutality occur frequently throughout the book, until tragedy feels more normal than a family dinner. This omnipresent death confines Petterson’s narrator to a limited moment in history. Time seems to exist solely in the span of the narration’s sixteen years; it is almost impossible to imagine the narrator existing in a different form of the present. Perhaps this accounts for the novel’s overwhelming sense of claustrophobia. Instead of feeling fatalistic as we read this book, we feel trapped.

I am more inclined to credit this effect to the strength of Petterson’s writing, however. On one hand, Petterson’s sentences can seem impossibly extended: they meander along with little regard for separation of images or ideas, and freely use conjunctions to link a sequence of independent statements. This sentence, for example, is a classic Petterson construction:

I loved my father and his crooked back, my father loved Jesper and all his quirky ideas, but his arms were hard and strong as twisted hawsers, and with those he started to shake Jesper, who was fifteen and newly confirmed, who was going to help him in the workshop before he began his printer’s apprenticeship. 

This sentence is long, yes, but in context of the novel’s structure, it becomes a form of architecture. Petterson’s extended syntax allows warmth to penetrate even the bleakest statements; the narrator is given freedom to connect whatever ideas she chooses. And this emotional fluidity is the root of the novel’s claustrophobia. Devastation and death are constant themes, yet in the same breath — the same sentence, in fact — is an unquenchable urge for escape into life. And, linked by extended syntax, this urge to live always collapses into death again. 

Finally, I want to examine the novel’s title. The narrator dreams of traveling to Siberia, an improbable destination, and one that even Jesper cannot quite understand. It’s freezing, it’s barren, and they have heard rumors of Siberian prison camps. Yet she is determined to travel there at all costs. By the novel’s conclusion, we still have not seen the narrator’s journey to Siberia. But if we could witness this long-anticipated voyage, I like to believe that we could also know the narrator as a person finally transcending her past.

Kara Riopelle ’10 is thinking of another Norwegian author who needs to be translated into English. Please contact her (riopelle@fas.harvard.edu) for more information if interested.