Content Tagged ‘Per Petterson’

A Mexican bard

January 6, 2016 | 8 Comments

Mexico’s acclaimed writer Daniel Sada, who died in 2011, wrote nine novels in Spanish. One Out of Two is the second to be translated to English, both by Katherine Silver. William Shakespeare would have applauded this story, which can be viewed as a marvelous mashup of two plays: The Comedy of Errors and Much Ado About Nothing.

The Gamal sisters, twin seamstresses, enjoy confusing people about their identities. Their small world in Ocampo, Chihuahua (Mexico), is upended one day when a suitor named Oscar Segura enters the picture—but exactly which sister is he courting, Gloria or Constitución? Using this mixed-up charade as a springboard, Sada spins a yarn that weaves in zingers about love, lust, sex, identity, profession, gender roles, weddings, marriages, funerals, ancestors, truth, deception, forgetting, and the passage of time. Ingenious metaphors explore broader themes: individualism, collectivism, symbiosis, codes of honor, and values. The storyteller’s clear distinctive voice spinning this comical tale is compelling. One can practically visualize the narrator’s arms waving dramatically, eyes rolling in exasperation and widening in anticipation, while the plot advances.

One method Sada used involves unique punctuation such as repeated colons—often two, three, or four in the same sentence—to give the narrator’s delivery an attitude. Sada also applied quite liberally the one-em dash for emphasis and ellipses for pauses. Toying with these marks allows a skilled author to develop an almost audible speech pattern by pushing readers to hear words on the page differently. In a similar vein, Norwegian writer Per Petterson totally shunned question marks in his recent novel I Refuse (reviewed), constructing a particular voice that slowly ratcheted up the tension, impelling readers to listen.

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Icy Nordic memories

December 22, 2014 | 6 Comments

Per Petterson, long loved by Norwegian readers, has become well respected outside the Scandinavian region as his books are rendered in other tongues. The prize-winning 2007 novel Out Stealing Horses was tagged one of that year’s Top Ten by both the New York Times and TIME Magazine, and has been translated into forty-nine languages. He’s written other fiction, but it’s been several years since the last book.

Until now. Number Nine, I Refuse, is due out in April—and it’s a gem.

The concise title symbolizes Petterson’s latest work. It’s short, as is the novel at less than 300 pages. The two-word label is clean, almost Spartan, conveying details through brevity—like most of the sentences found within. Yet one still encounters protracted sentences that reverberate like a drum, steadily provoking a sense of dread. One such powerful linguistic unit containing 156 words focuses on memory.

Rights to the novel have been sold in sixteen countries. For the American edition, designer Kyle G. Hunter used a single row of black leafless trees ringing a frozen pond to slash the utterly white cover in half. One must look closely to find two dark silhouettes trudging toward one another on its surface. Or, are they? The title’s succinct words appear in red against this cold backdrop, almost as a semaphore to signal the reader about what’s inside this lean Nordic tale.

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