I highly recommend this book, if, like me, you like your space and solitude and can relate to someone seeking actively seeking it.

The main character, Trond, is in his 60's, reliving his teenage experiences with his Dad. So it hops back and forth in time, seamlessly, and shows this incredible bond between father and son. The bond is so strong that events that come along are not easily understood at first. They don't always fit in with the first perception of the close familial bond.

The location, Norway, is fascinating: Petterson spends much time discussing the geography, botany, and farm activities of Norway. The weather, with the short days and long nights then is shifted to long days with short nights, and this seasonal shift seems to be reflected in the character's choices.

I don't want to say much else, as to ruin it for someone else, but do curl up with this on a quiet afternoon, with a pot of hot coffee. Have your dog at your feet and a blanket to curl up with, as inevitably you'll soon feel chilly.

One thing that astounded me again, in reading this, has been my noticing of late that many books involving older people seem to have all of them reliving their childhood moments, specifically their teen years. I don't know why I hadn't noticed that before. Maybe it wasn't my time to notice those things. It made me wonder, does my dad, at roughly the same age, think about his father in most waking moments? I think I should ask. Because in my life it seems I'm so occupied with just the here and now, I don't have time to look back, and can't really think of a single teenage experience significant enough to ponder in the future. ( )

The story is a good one - but it is the writing that makes this a spectacular book. The prose is smooth and simple, but very evocative. I knew I was in a Scandinavian country - many of the books I've read by Scandinavian authors have a similar style. The reader feels the extremes of weather and of solitude. The characters are clearly drawn. You know who they are in just a few well chosen words. This is just a beautiful book. ( )

http://tinyurl.com/yge83s6

I love any novel set in Scandinavia. It's not the fact that it makes me feel cold to read it (as a friend recently put it), but that the language is always spare and to the point. I honestly don't think there's a Norwegian Hemingway-- I think all Norwegian writers channel him.

While I appreciated the style of the writing, it was ultimately confusing in places. There are two to three different timelines, depending on how you look at it, and Petterson does weave them together adroitly for the most part, but at times you are not quite sure if the current character is the boy or the man. This could very well be one of Petterson's points, but it makes it a little difficult to follow.

There's a lot going on here-- the mystery of one's own father, the danger of war, planned and unplanned isolation from a community. I can't easily reconcile the early interactions between the boy and his friend Jon with the later interactions of the man and Jon's brother, Lars. Is this meant to describe the reticence of Norwegian culture? Because there's not much going on on the surface, and it's a mystery to some degree what is happening in these people's brains.

In the long run, I like these kinds of novels for the sense of peace that they give me, even while they're sotto voce discussing things best left unearthed. ( )

DICKENS IN NORWAY

While this is a “coming of age” novel, it is not just that. It is also a novel of Trond “coming to grips” with his own character and his place in the world. The respective progressions of his coming of age and coming to grips are told in not-quite parallel vignettes of the past and the present.
It is significant that his present begins in the autumn. It is as if he is finishing what was begun in that important summer of 1948, when he was fifteen. Although he has not gone back to the precise location where he had spent that summer with his father, it is a strikingly similar place. Both locations are close to the Swedish border. Both are small cabins outside small towns. The point is brought home by the ambiguous sentence Trond uses to remark the coincidence of his being Lars’s neighbor: “What I have wondered is how we can end up in the same place after all these years.” (p. 155, emphasis in original). Of course it is not merely coincidence:

That kind of coincidence seems far-fetched in fiction, in modern novels anyway, and I find it hard to accept. It may be all very well in Dickens, but when you read Dickens you’re reading a long ballad from a vanished world, where everything has to come together in the end like an equation, where the balance of what was once disturbed must be restored so that the gods can smile again.

(p. 60).
Despite Trond’s protestations, this novel is Dickensian in its balancing and coincidences. For example, he awakens late and has trouble getting out of bed (pp. 168-69) the morning he goes with his father and Franz when they chopped the lumber stays down in order to have the timber fall into the river. Trond wishes, “I had a friend like Franz I could swing my axe with and make plans and use my strength with and laugh and cut logs with by a river…” (p. 173). More than fifty years later, he again awakens late, has trouble getting out of bed (p.119), and spends the day happily working with Lars to remove the tree that had been uprooted by the storm the night before. He got his wish. But the later incident is more than just an echo of the earlier one. The earlier incident ends with Trond’s oedipal challenge to his father’s relationship with Jon’s (and Lars’s) mother by squeezing between them where they sit together on a log (!). In the second incident, he is able to come to terms with his father by becoming friendly with Lars. It needs to be recalled that Trond had learned many physical tasks from his father simply by imitating him:

I close my eyes every time I have to do something practical apart from the daily chores everyone has, and then I picture how my father would have done it or how he actually did do it while I was watching him, and then I copy that until I fall into the proper rhythm, and the task reveals itself….And the person observing is me, and the man I am watching, his movements and skills, is a man of barely forty, as my father was when I saw him for the last time when I was fifteen, and he vanished from my life forever. To me he will be never be older.

(pp.69-70, emphasis in original). The one thing he did not learn from his father was how to use a chainsaw; “The one-man saws had not reached the Norwegian forests in 1948.” (p.72). Thus, it is Lars who discharges the role of his father:

I like watching Lars work. I would not call him brisk, but he is systematic and moves more elegantly up to the birch trunk with the heavy saw in his grasp than he does out on the road with Poker. His style infects my style, and that is how it usually is for me; the movement first and then the comprehension…

(p.141, emphasis mine). The Dickensian complexity is shown when we add to the notion that Lars is filling the place of Trond’s father, Trond’s own notion that Lars substituted for Trond as a son to Trond’s father:

‘Did you take the place that was rightfully mine? Did you have years out of my life that I should have lived?’

(p. 198). There are more reverberations. Lars had years of life that his twin, Odd, should have lived. Jon took over the farm when Lars was only twenty years old, and had years of life with their mother that Lars should have had. Trond’s father moved in with Jon’s mother, and had years of life Jon’s father should have had. Then again, it was Trond that caused Jon’s father and Trond’s father were clearly competing for the attention of Jon’s mother when stacking logs (!), it was Trond puting his arm around Jon’s mother that distracted Jon’s father so that he fell and was hurt. He went to the hospital, and never returned to his family. It was a Dickensian balance that Trond would have to replace Lars’s father with his own, only to have an echo of his father back in the person of Lars.
1948 was the year of Trond’s passage from childhood to manhood. He becomes aware of his sexuality and the feeling of power it gives him. It is Jon who first shows him his own power:

What he had taught me was to be reckless, taught me that if I let myself go, did not slow myself down by thinking so much beforehand I could achieve many things I would never have dreamt possible.

(p. 18). That Trond is not yet mature enough to handle his own new-found power is shown metaphorically when he lands wrong on the horse, hurting his crotch, and is thrown from the horse. It is not until Trond is subject to the feminine and civilizing influence of his mother that he truly matures. He symbolically crosses the border into manhood when he crosses into Sweden with his mother. His maturity is shown when he controls his irrational temper with the man who does not understand his request for directions, and his mother buys him his first suit. The success of this crossing into Sweden is in sharp contrast to the time he had previously gone with his father on the three day trip. Trond had been so excited to cross over to Sweden that he lost control of his horse and was thrown to the ground.
Similarly, it is not until Trond’s daughter comes to visit him and he learns that they had both had similar thoughts about David Copperfield. He realizes that, like his own father, he had abandoned his child, and was not there when she had needed to talk to him. After her visit he is finally able to integrate his past and his present and to see himself clearly:

I look out at the yard, but there is nothing but my own reflection in the dark glass.

(p.201). Thus, like David Copperfield, he is the leading character of his own life, and everything falls “into its rightful place in the end.” (p. 198). Seeing his reflection—his twin--demonstrates that he has found that necessary part of himself that remained missing from so many other characters and lives in the novel.

this book is about so much that i don't know where to begin. the relationships between fathers and sons, friendship, old age, death, life.... just read it, its really good! ( )