I Curse the River of Time

It's 1989 and "three monumental events twine around one another in Arvid Jansen's penumbral soul. His fifteen-year marriage is dissolving, his mother is dying of cancer, and the Berlin Wall is tumbling down. The parallels are obvious—worlds are ending, internally and externally—but the analogies Petterson draws among these dramatic endings are not....I Curse the River of Time is a little like the starker reaches of the West, a little like the stonier shores of Maine, a little like Edward Hopper, a little like Raymond Carver....There is a quality that I can only call charm, or something like charm, to Petterson's essentially dark and lonely sensibility....It exerts a gravitational pull on the reader" (Stacey D'Erasmo, The New York Times Book Review).