caribousmom

The picture of Mao I had was the well-known retouched photograph where he sits hunched over his desk writing with one of those Chinese brush pens, and I always thought, or hoped, that it was not one of  his political or philosophical articles he was writing, but one of his poems, perhaps the one which begins:

Fragile images of departure, the village back then.
I curse the river of time; thirty-two years have passed.

for it showed the human Mao, someone I was drawn to, someone who had felt how time was battling his body, as I had felt it so often myself; how time without warning could catch up with me and run around beneath my skin like tiny electric shocks and I could not stop them, no matter how hard I tried. – from I Curse the River of Time, page 56 -

Avrid Jansen is thirty-seven years old and has spent nearly twenty years searching for the truth through Communism. But now the year is 1989 and Communism is unraveling. Avrid is faced with a crisis of identity when his marriage fails and he learns that his mother has cancer, and everything he has believed in seems to be crumbling. When Avrid discovers his mother has left Norway to return to Denmark where she was born and raised, he boards a ferry to join her at their summer house.

Per Petterson’s novel I Curse The River of Time is the story of a man and his mother – two people who have drifted apart and are now brought back together. The story is non linear and told almost entirely from Avrid’s limited point of view. Avrid remembers moments from his childhood and the early days of his marriage. Gradually, the fault lines in his relationships and his insecurities are revealed. The reader discovers that Avrid has rejected his parents’ wish that he be educated and leave behind his working class roots. Instead, in alignment with his Communist leanings, Avrid chooses to leave college and go to work in the factory where his father once toiled.

[...] I wanted to be part of the working class, which, for Christ’s sake I already was, and always had been. The whole point, for them, was that I should stop being working class so they could all be proud of me, because I had been allowed to go farther. - from I Curse the River of Time, page 145 -

There is much in the novel that remains ambiguous and unnamed. Avrid’s mother seems to have a history which is largely secret, or at least Avrid remains ignorant of it. Because of this, the novel takes on a drifting, dreamlike atmosphere which I found bleak. Avrid fumbles and struggles with his identity as son, husband and Maoist. At times he seems to lack any insight into who he is and who he wishes to be, and he sees his life as something which he has little control over.

I have never really been able to see enormous changes coming until the last minute, never see how one trend conceals another, as Mao used to say, how the one flowing right below the surface can move in a whole different direction than the one you thought everyone had agreed on, and if you did not pay attention when everything was shifting, you would be left behind alone. – from I Curse the River of Time, page 67 -

Petterson’s prose is spare and reflective, and he provides little hope in a novel about loss, isolation, regret, and confused identity. The landscape of a wintry Norway and Denmark are a perfect backdrop to the story. In fact, the descriptions of scene were some of my favorites in the book.

I Curse the River of Time revisits some of the themes from Petterson’s award winning book Out Stealing Horses (read my review) – those of identity, a boy’s ambivalence with a parent, grief and loss – but it is a much bleaker book. I can’t say I enjoyed the novel as it is a sad meditation on aging, marriage and the child/parent relationship, but I did respect the writing which allows the reader to fully realize the character development.

Readers who enjoy literary fiction in translation and who have appreciated Petterson’s previous work might want to give this one a try.

Read other reviews of this book:

The Black Sheep Dances
White Walls, Black Ink
The Collagist

Have you read and reviewed this book? Leave me a link in the comments and I’ll add your review above.

*FTC Disclosure: I received a copy of this book through the publisher for review on my blog. This review was also provided in conjunction with The Spotlight Series tour for Graywolf Press.

A man had been killed and a woman who had an uncertain relationship to the dead man was accused of the crime. But tangled up in Emma Cunningham’s case was an eleven-year-old houseboy and a Negro groom, both as fragile as loose pieces of straw, blown into the path of a murder that was reaching deep into the strata of the city. - from 31 Bond Street, page 171 -

Back in early February 1857 a well-known dentist, Dr. Harvey Burdell, was discovered dead on the floor of his New York city office…his throat cut ear to ear, nearly severing the head from the body. The murder immediately captured the imaginations of the press, making front page news and being declared the “crime of the century.” As lurid details emerged of Burdell’s relationship with Emma Cunningham, a widow living with her two daughters on the top floor of Burdell’s home, the focus of the prosecution was narrowed. Emma Cunningham was arrested and charged with the crime.

It is these details which aroused the curiosity of writer Ellen Horan and formed the basis of her first novel 31 Bond Street. Horan opens the book with the murder, then takes the reader back and forth in time to flush out the characters and plot. The book is narrated from two points of view. Emma Cunningham’s voice is mostly from the past, sketching out the details of how she meets Burdell and ends up moving into his home. It is through Emma that Horan creates the fictional components of the book – imagining what must have occurred between her and Burdell and giving insight into the events leading up to the murder.

Horan balances her novel with the voice of Henry Clinton – the lawyer who Cunningham employed to defend her. Clinton’s point of view allows the reader to peer into the mind of the defense attorney as he develops his case, and also takes us into the thrilling atmosphere of the courtroom.

Throughout the book, Horan adds colorful and accurate detail of time and place, successfully capturing the streets of nineteenth-century New York. She intersperses real newspaper quotes about the murder and trial as well which lends authenticity to this fictional work. The recreated sounds of the press were wonderful.

A soapbox orator had placed a carton near the crowd and was sermonizing to no one in particular. “It’s the crime of the century!” he cried. “Every now and then a tremendous explosion blows off the covering and lets us look in upon the rotten heart of a certain style of city life. We have looked inside this house at 31 Bond Street with loathing. We see the bitter end of a man’s career, his very life, which came about when he traded the sweet caresses of domestic purity for the polluting caresses of a ‘black-hearted woman.’” - from 31 Bond Street, page 128 -

My favorite part of the novel was the trial itself. I purposefully did not read the true account because I did not want to know the outcome of the trial until I read it in the book. And I’m glad I did that as it made the novel more suspenseful and captivating for me.

Thematically, Horan explores the role of women in nineteenth century society, the racial undertones which reverberated in the pre-Civil war era, and the impact of the press in criminal cases. Her ability to intertwine all of these themes with the core plot of the book makes this not only a crime fiction novel, but an historical fiction book that brings this time in history to life.

If you have not yet figured it out, I thoroughly enjoyed this novel from start to finish. Readers who love historical fiction and also enjoy a good mystery or crime novel, will want to pick up a copy of this book and read it. 31 Bond Street is impeccably researched and expertly written.

Highly recommended.

Read my TLC Book Tour of this book.

Read other reviews by following links from TLC Book Tours.

*FTC Disclosure: I received this novel from the publisher for review on my blog.