It took Per Petterson six years to complete "Men in My Situation". Along the way, he has literally banged his forehead against the keyboard and been on the verge of giving up multiple times. The book’s overwhelming reception has therefore been a huge relief.
After an arduous literary pregnancy, Per Petterson’s novel Men in My Situation has received glowing reviews at home in Norway and is now being launched in a number of countries. Männer in meiner Lage will be published in German this fall – and Petterson is heading for the Frankfurt Book Fair in October.
From successful book to the silver screen
Petterson has already been in Germany on an important trip earlier this year. However, it was for another novel: the monster success Out Stealing Horses and its film adaptation.
The striking and vivid tale of 67-year old Trond Sander, who is remembering and reliving a summer from fifty years earlier, secured Petterson’s major breakthrough both in Norway and on an international level.
Now, fifteen years after the novel was published, “The Horses” – as the author himself tends to call it – had a whole new life breathed into it: this spring, the film was shown
at the Berlin Film Festival. Director Hans Petter Moland was responsible for the adaptation of the novel, with Stellan Skarsgård, Danica Curcic, Jon Ranes and Tobias Santelmann in the main roles.
And with Per Petterson as a slightly nervous spectator on the sidelines.
“Films and novels are two completely different things, and I accept that, of course. But film as a medium has a visual power that makes me a bit nervous. In another context, I was asked if I could draw a map of The Horses’ setting. A map? No, I can’t! I’ve never made anything like that. There are a few houses in the book that are concrete, but the rest is rather vague. The transition to film can be particularly difficult in that respect.
It removes the vague elements that readers create and shape in their own minds and replaces it with something defined.”
The escape abroad
Per Petterson’s anxiety around the publishing of his own books has become a well-known affair in Norwegian literary circles. When the books are published, he doesn’t call upon the public; on the contrary, he makes himself inaccessible to everyone except those closest to him. It’s actually become a tradition for the 66-year old author to travel abroad as the launch date of a new novel approaches.
“I’m happy to do a few interviews a bit in advance, and with each publication since The Horses, I’ve also allowed my old friend and current mayor of Rælingen, Øyvind Sand, to
interview me just before the release date. But then I will clear off and leave the country. I’m a bit of a nervous and vulnerable type. It’s tough for me to
deal with reviews when they come. I can’t bear it. I just have to leave,” says Petterson.
Brilliant reception
Either way, he had no reason to worry. Men in My Situation was received with glowing reviews across the board, and as the end of 2018 approached, the novel had been printed
in a run of 39,000 and sold to seventeen countries. In addition, it was selected for a number of newspapers’ “best of the year” lists, as well as nominated for the P2 Listeners’ Novel Prize and the Youth Critics’ Prize, among others.
“I don’t remember there ever being such a commotion around any of my past publications. The response has been quite overwhelming, and it’s come as a huge relief – because it’s been a real struggle to write this book. It took me six years, and along the way I’ve actually banged my forehead against the keyboard and been on the verge of giving up multiple times,” the author says, and explains why:
“I was approaching it the wrong way, and for a long time I didn’t understand what kind of book I was writing. I was pleased with the first chapter and wrote some of the women’s
scenes quite early on. The story was going in that direction, but then I thought, Wait, no, that’s not where it should be.’ It had something to do with Arvid’s (editor’s note: the book’s protagonist) children.”
Wrote in a panic
According to Petterson, his subconscious simply did not want to go where he was trying to get.
“I prefer to write scenes, and it’s both there and in dialogue that the most important things happen. And these can’t be abbreviated. You have to stay in the scene until it’s done – but this time it took a terribly long time to get there.”
And before he got there, panic set in.
“I’m 66 years old and this is the only thing I can do. And if I don’t even manage this… what do I have left?” Many people might think that such an experienced writer would know the process so well that these problems would diminish as the years go by. To that, Petterson simply shakes his head.
“It doesn’t help if you’re experienced. That doesn’t make it any easier, but it doesn’t build up greater performance anxiety, either. Above all, it’s really about feeling a sense of obligation to your readers. You have to be truthful and follow up on what you’ve put out before, and it would be unfortunate if I felt like I was disappointing them.”
Late debut
Per Petterson was already well-established in Oslo’s literary milieu before his debut in 1987. With a far left-leaning political stance, he was responsible for foreign literature
at the Tronsmo bookstore, and his close friends included leading radical writers such as Dag Solstad, Espen Haavardsholm and Edvard Hoem.
“I was already dreaming of becoming a writer back then, but didn’t have enough confidence. In retrospect, I’m glad I debuted quite late, at 35 years old. Although I was involved in politics, I couldn’t have written the kind of social realism that characterized the 1970s. There wasn’t any room for me and the type of literature I was writing at that time. It was only when the 1970s were shattered that a niche opened up for me as well.”
From that niche, Per Petterson has slowly established himself as one of Norway’s most popular and well-respected authors. This, however, hasn’t stopped anyone from expressing disappointment with Arvid Jansen in Men in My Situation, a character who comes across as a desperate man in freefall with a striking lack of maturity.
“Arvid is inattentive in his life and in a constant crisis, but he’s not mature enough to realize this himself,” the author says, elaborating on the character’s difficult relationship to women.
“To them, he is both reserved and reckless. But what really characterizes him is that he’s afraid to commit, and that he lacks the language to put words to his emotions. Like many
men, Arvid has a hard time talking, and instead of losing face, he keeps his mouth shut. Something along these lines also characterizes his relationship with his daughters. He’s very fond of his girls, but he still can’t master the duties of a father. He’s far too much in his own head for that.”
Borrowed features
Arvid Jansen is not new to Per Petterson’s literary universe; we’ve met him in several of Petterson’s previous novels, most recently in the award-winning “I Curse the River of Time” from 2010. Arvid Jansen has become Per Petterson’s alter ego, but he’s also caused some trouble for Petterson in this era of reality literature. After all, Jansen is a writer from Veitvet with a revolutionary background who has been through a divorce and who lost members of his immediate family in a boat fire. Just like Petterson.
“A good part of Arvid Jansen’s exterior has been taken from my life. The roots have meaning to me, and it’s important to have an anchor when you’re writing. Everything else has very little to do with me, though; it’s fiction.”
Anchoring provides freedom
Do you find it problematic that people actually read you into your novels?
“I actually don’t care about that at all. By anchoring some of what’s outside into what’s familiar, I feel much freer in the writing process. It gives me more opportunity to add and take away without losing the truth in the story along the way,” responds the author, who believes that not even he gets to choose whether a book should include Arvid or not. The story determines that.
“When I wrote the opening scene in my last novel, I Refuse, I quickly realized that the main character, Tommy, had borrowed some characteristics from a guy I knew, and that this was so unlike Arvid Jansen that it couldn’t possibly be him. On the other hand, picking up his ex at an abandoned railway station – something we experience in the first chapter of Men in My Situation – is typical Arvid. I know this because I’ve gotten to know him so well over time,” Petterson explains.
This time, he also lets Arvid Jansen celebrate Christmas with his ex-wife Turid and the couple’s three daughters at the home of his former mother-in-law. It doesn’t go well, to put it lightly, with Arvid not only ending up at the bar, but also drunk and in a fistfight before the Christmas peace has even descended upon the bloodred snow.
“Arvid’s Christmas was just as it had to be, and I had a whole lot of fun writing the dialogue at the bar. Fortunately, I’ve never had a Christmas like that myself. On the contrary – I have quite a good relationship with Christmas,” Per Petterson says enthusiastically.
With his car as sanctuary
He also has a great relationship with his car.
“I gain peace of mind sitting behind the wheel, especially in the evening or at night, when it’s dark and calm. But even though I love to drive, it’s far more important in my books than in my own life,” claims Per Petterson.
“Yet Arvid uses his car as more of a refuge than as a pure escape,” Petterson emphasizes, pointing out that when Arvid’s marriage was ailing, he’d often take a mattress and duvet to his car to sleep there.
“The car became a sanctuary when the pressure of marriage became too much for him,” says Petterson, who created his own sanctuary at the smallholding Porten deep in the forest, where he and his wife Pia moved 25 years ago. At that time, the main house was
run down, drafty, and lacking running water and indoor plumbing, but it has now been renovated and rebuilt with an angular living room and sunroom – and his study a few dozen meters away from the house. He goes there at the crack of dawn to work, and it is here he sends journalists on the rare occasions he invites members of the press to his smallholding. The main house is off limits.
“I work in my study, so it’s the most natural place to talk to journalists. I live in the main house, and they have no business in there, unless I want an ‘at home with’ story. And I don’t want that,” the author concludes.
From the Norwegian by Oliva Lasky