I’ve been reading this book for over a year before falling asleep, and it works well as that. Er, I mean, it’s not that it’s boring or anything, but it’s a journal and I can read a couple of pages, or read a dozen pages, and it’s fine — I don’t have to remember much of what’s gone one before.
And now I finally finished it! So how is it?
Petterson’s most famous book is definitely Out Stealing Horses, and that is indeed a very good book, but I’ve read all of his books (I think?) and they’re all pretty spiffy.
This book was written over about six months in 2021, during Corona, and happened because Petterson doesn’t know whether he can write anything any more. It’s a solid diary/journal thing, but written with publication in mind, so it’s not overly diarish. (That’s a word.)
The thing that got most attention when it was published was that it includes a couple pages where Petterson is annoyed with his US publisher, Graywolf, who had some comments about his then-latest book, I Curse The River Of Time. There’s a passage there about how the protagonist used to play Cowboys And Indians as a child, and he always preferred playing Indian; and more than that, he wanted to be an Indian. Graywolf wanted to add a parentheses saying something like “but of course that’s impossible, since he’s Norwegian”, and Petterson thought that was a pretty moronic thing to add.
Which it was. The past (i.e., 2021) was a different country, eh?
This book has not been translated, and Petterson says in the text that he doesn’t want it to be, either.
Mitt Abruzzo (2021) by Pet Petterson (3.9 on Goodreads)
