Per Petterson
I admire American literature, both contemporary and classic - 'Moby-Dick' is just about the best book in the world - and I admire British literature for its insistence on dealing with social class. It may have been an influence.
To me, a book is a book. A novel is a novel, and you have hundreds of possibilities, options, and they may all be fine. Charles Dickens or Ingeborg Bachmann, Claude Simon or later writers. The one and only condition is that it has to be good: it has to have quality, substance, atmosphere.
The important discovery I made very early is that my novels had to be written without any given plan or outline. I can't do it in any other way. But then they are dependent on the sentences, my intuition, and, as I have experienced many times, the subconscious.
I was born in 1952, so obviously the sixties were important. That's when I came of age. It was also a revolutionary period, a complete break with the generation before us in terms of culture, literature, music, and in politics, of course. 1968 was an important year; I was 16, and the world became clear to me, visible, so to say.
I grew up in the city. Both my mother and father were factory workers, and I loved the life in the 'metro.' Everybody saw me as a very urban guy. And I was.
To say that a family is happy I think is to diminish it, taking out what is interesting. Growing up, I don't think my family was any happier or unhappier than anyone else's. My mother and father should have been divorced or never even married. On the other hand, I remember many moments of happiness.
I don't know if nature is a direct literary influence on my writing, but it is certainly important to me. I take great joy in writing about it. It is something I have taken with me from my childhood; the body exposed to the threat of the physical world and at the same time being at home in it.
I come from a working-class family. They're the people I know and the people I love, I guess. I do not write about them for political reasons, but because, as I see it, most interesting things - social, political, emotional - take place there. It's a bottomless well for an author like me.
Philosophically I am, or at least have been, a follower of Sartre. I am very interested in the choices we make, or don't make, in life-defining matters. That moment of 'angst' and its consequences can be such a cruel thing.
I decided if I couldn't be a writer, my life would be miserable. I had this imaginary room of references to all the books I had read, a kind of bubble, in which I lived.
Some critics said, 'Hey, why are you writing historical novels?' I say they're not historical, they're contemporary, because people walking around who lived through this, even a little bit, they carry it inside. The contemporary isn't just what you can see now.
I'm a family-based person, even though we didn't exactly have a very happy family. I was never in any doubt that this was a centre of writing.
If you're a Norwegian writer, you are not visible in the world. The door of the English language is very hard to open for a Norwegian writer.
When my mother talked about her brother, there was this light in her eyes. I thought, 'This is the basis of a novel.'
I hate plots.
'In the Wake' was a very bleak book. This relationship was not too good, the father and son. This time around, I wanted a father and a son who really loved each other, which would be visible on the first page and would still be there on the last page.
When you are a sentence-based writer, they have to be good. They have to be really on the spot. Because when you don't have a plot, really, what shall you rely on? Just language. And sometimes I am so afraid of writing the wrong thing, I just sit and wait for the right thing to come.
I write about families. That is who we are.
1989 was such a very, very important year in Europe. The wall fell, the Soviet Union was crumbling, and so many things happened - in 15 minutes, the world changed.
Making sentences is what I do. I mean, the story will come as I write.
I rely heavily on rhythm when I write. You should tap your foot when you read it, all the way through.
At first I wanted to go to university, but I really didn't dare to. I was too self-conscious, being a working-class kid. It was really difficult. I was going to study history, but the professor asked me some questions I didn't understand, and I didn't dare to ask what they meant. I left university and went to work in the Post.
A lot can change because you are embarrassed by something.
I worked in a bookstore in Oslo, importing the English-language books.
Living here where I live, on a farm way out in the countryside, in the woods, in fact, I have plenty of time to be alone, and I like it. I always have. I like my own company. And I am not the only one who feels this way; a high percentage of the Norwegian population feel as I do.
In a household tragedy, you are very much aware of being alone. It is something that is possible to grasp, and that is why it hurts so much. Because you are alone. I know a little about this.
I do not think of literature as something confessional or therapeutic. I make sentences in order to be precise about experiences and things. I am urged by many things and no things in particular.
There is always this quarrel about what is preferable: the straight, naturalistic, epic storytelling or the modernistic, disjointed, slightly hermetic one. To me it does not matter, as long as it's good. I like both kinds. Although the common reader seems to prefer the first, which is to be expected, and who would blame her?
I do consider myself a Norwegian writer, or a Scandinavian writer, as my family tree reaches into both Denmark and Sweden. I don't think about it, of course, when I am writing.
When a translation is very good, it is fascinating to see how the book changes and yet stays the same. I think 'Out Stealing Horses' sounds more American for Americans than it does in Norway, and still, it is all there, everything that I wrote. It's amazing.
To tell you the truth, I don't edit much at all. Most times, when I have finished the first draft, that's the book. Of course, I work on the page I am on until I am happy with it. I might even say that I try to state the landscape.
I remember a lot of dreams. Sometimes they are hard to distinguish from what has really happened. That is not so terrible. It is the same with books.Collection: Dream
If I just concentrate I can walk into memory's store and find the right shelf with the right film and disappear into it.Collection: Memories
One of my many horrors is to become the man with the frayed jacket and unfastened flies standing at the Co-op counter with egg on his shirt and more too because the mirror in the hall has given up the ghost. A shipwrecked man without an anchor in the world except in his own liquid thoughts where time has lost its sequence.Collection: Men
...when it came to dying, I was scared. Not of being dead, that I could not comprehend, to be nothing was impossible to grasp and therefore really nothing to be scared of, but the dying itself I could comprehend, the very instant when you know that now comes what you have always feared, and you suddenly realise that every chance of being the person you really wanted to be, is gone for ever, and the one you were, is the one those around you will remember.Collection: Dying
But that's life. That's what you learn from; when things happen. Especially at your age. You just have to take it in and remember to think afterwards and not forget and never grow bitter.Collection: Thinking
You decide for yourself when it will hurt.Collection: Hurt
Time is important to me now, I tell myself.Not that it should pass quickly or slowly, but only be time, be something I live inside and fill with physical things and activities that I can divide it up by. so that it grows distict to me and does not vanish when I am not looking.Collection: Important
A dead dog is more quiet than a house on the steppes, a chair in a empty room.Collection: Dog