Interview:Fresh from the elation of winning the Impac prize, Per Pettersontalks to Eileen Battersby, Literary Correspondent
The words have to feel right, says Per Petterson, and the use of the word "feel" is crucial. His work is sensitive, but never sentimental.
Within hours of being announced the winner of this year's International Impac Dublin Literary Award, his nervousness has waned and he appears to have returned to his usual self, approachable, almost jaunty, ever ready to talk books, books, books. He seems a buoyant character, very quick and funny. He is surrounded by people intent on stressing how tired he is. Happy the winning author, particularly happy the winning author who knows that all who have read his beautifully evocative novel, Out Stealing Horses, in which an old man revisits his youth, love it.
He likes it too. Where did it come from? From life, and hours, days, years of reading, as well as from living, feeling. Petterson loves books; he grew up watching his mother read them. He went to the library in Oslo and asked for a job. "I studied librarianship for two years and then left it to work as a labourer for five, that was hard, then I went back to the library course; they asked me, 'weren't you here before?' I did finish, but then I spent 12 years working in a bookstore, a great bookstore, the one in the book [ In the Wake]," he says. Here is a man who has lived a happier variation of Faust's life - at least, as far as books are concerned.
Small and animated, he has the face of a character actor, not at all like the photographs on the book jackets. It is difficult imagining him sitting still long enough to write a letter, never mind a book. He bounds about on the balls of his feet. His English is good, very nuanced and his delivery is as witty as a New Yorker on a good day. "I learnt English from the very beginning at school, but also from the movies. In Norway, they aren't dubbed. In Holland and Germany, they dub them. But in Norway, we have subtitles; you 'hear' the English spoken. When I was 18, I was in London. I had never spoken English, but there I was, in England, when I opened my mouth, all these English words for things came out. I was speaking English, even though I had never 'spoken' it before," The boy who liked reading also liked football. "I was good at it, but not good enough. It came too easy, so I didn't try harder," he says. "I was born in the east side of Oslo, the working class part."
Dublin's City Hall, on Thursday, the evening of the award ceremony is not the ideal place for an interview. It must be midnight, tables are being cleared. Stacks of plates are carried aloft past us. Urgency is in the air. Each time we try to begin, another well-wisher interrupts, praising his book, praising his wonderful acceptance speech.
Every 30 seconds or so it seems, his agent appears, as does his publisher, reminding him they're going for a drink, telling me he is exhausted. Making me feel very guilty about interviewing him. Finally, I say "I'm tired too, exactly how important can a drink be?" "Very," says Petterson, "ask Raymond Carver." We race on, high speed conversation, braced against the next interruption.
Petterson is good company, exciting, direct and as candid as his fiction - although there is an additional dimension to his writing: a melancholic grace. He says, "I didn't think I would win this, you know, two of my heroes, Coetzee and Cormac McCarthy - that [ No Country for Old Men] is not his best book - were on the shortlist . . . I didn't expect to win." Out Stealing Horses has collected several awards. It took the British Independent Foreign Fiction prize from one of the strongest award shortlists ever compiled, as well as winning Norway's major prizes and two in France. "It's good," he says, with his boy's smile, "it has been good to have this." He does seem young in attitude, considering he was born in 1953. "No, that's a lie," he says, "I was born in 1952." His hardback book-jacket says 1953. "No this is a lie, I am 54, I will be 55 on July 18th. How do I feel? Young, not so young, youngish. But not old either. I gave up smoking five years ago. I don't feel young so much as lighter. The first time I sat on a horse I was 41, and I fell off so many times . . . I don't ride horses, I just write about them." Not that Out Stealing Horses is about horses.
Fiction for him is made up of everything. "Take a part of your life and blow it up to see what you have, people are always looking to see what part is my life, what part isn't, but it is not just that." He is right, there is far more to it than the facts: the strength of the fiction rests in the way the writer uses the material. He had already begun writing and had published three books, one a collection of stories - "Although that too was a novel," he says, when a tragedy so shocking as to be surreal occurred. It changed the way he was writing. It pushed him towards voice.
His father, mother and two of his brothers died in a freak ferry disaster. "It was 1990, April 7th. I was supposed to be with them, but I had said I would join them later." The family had been on its way to the holiday home in Denmark, a cabin in Jutland, but a journey taken so many times over the years ended in a news report. "I had a call from my ex-wife, she told me to turn on the television. There it was, this ferry on fire. I didn't know it; I hadn't seen that boat before, it was a new one. But 159 people died; and my parents, and my brothers . . . it was some funeral, four coffins. When something that bad happens it is almost easier to deal with. You are numb.
"If it was one death, your girlfriend, you would be crying and sad, but death on this scale, well . . . And you know, it had followed so many deaths in the 1980s. People around me, my grandparents, friends, had begun to die. It seemed that I was always carrying another coffin."
Only now do I realise how closely In the Wake - published in Norway in 2000, and then in Anne Born's superb English translation two years later - is based on real-life events. I find myself apologising to him for not having suspected that he suffered all the horrors his character Arvid went through.
A strongly autobiographical dimension emerges. He has drawn his fiction from life, his life. "Yes, I did say to my father, the last time I spoke to him, 'I will see you on Monday'." Petterson had apparently forgotten he was due to travel with his family, but instead of admitting this, he said he would join them a few days later. "You see there was a 60th birthday party [ in Oslo] for my ex mother-in-law and I wasn't going, but my daughters were. I didn't want to get involved in explaining all of that to my father, so I had thought I would just say I would join them [ at the holiday home in Denmark] later."
IN THE NOVEL, In the Wake, Arvid is also a writer and a former book seller. He too was a son who saw his once all-powerful and athletic father suffer. There is a passage from In the Wake that stays in the memory. Arvid, the narrator, a man in the grip of a breakdown: "I will tell you something about my father. He was past 40 when I was born, but he was different from the other men where we lived. He was an athlete. I mean a real pro. He had taken his body as far as it could go and filled it with a strength you would think it could not hold, and you could see it in the way he walked and in the way he ran, in the way he talked and in the way he laughed that there was a fire inside him that no-one could ignore, and it was clear from the way that he was seen that he was body and energy both." That same father is described standing by a hospital ward window, crying with pain and the son having witnessed this private moment, can only walk away. In the Wake is remarkable and will convince admirers of Out Stealing Horses that Petterson has something very real to offer. "That father-son thing is very important to me."
To Siberia, the first of his books to be translated into English, also by Anne Born, is about his mother, and is written in a woman's first person voice. "I thought to myself 'men and women are the same, they only look different. I can be a woman'. My mother was Danish; my father was born in Norway of Swedish parents. I am Norwegian and I feel happy in this Scandinavian territory, I speak Swedish, we often drive over the border [ into Sweden]. And we have been going to Denmark for years. My mother was 14 when the Germans invaded Denmark. You know she had a brother who died. When she spoke about him her eyes would light up in a way they never did when she spoke about my father. I knew this brother was special . . . But I could never have written that book [ To Siberia] when she was alive."
Instinct makes him an artist. It lies in his unsentimental, elegiac response to memory. The way an incident from long ago, such as seeing a friend brutally crush bird eggs and then smash the nest, is recalled and becomes a moment of chilling beauty. He tells me about his other books, the ones yet to be translated. "People have always liked my books, they like what I have to say", but he is convinced that the move to the first person voice which began with To Siberia has been crucial. Did this being the centenary of the great Norwegian composer Grieg's death seem like a good omen for his win? "Is it?" he laughs, "No, I'm a pop music man, not rock, English pop music."
His move to the country has proved valuable. His second wife, Pia, "pulled me out of the city, and I'm a city boy. I have two daughters, Pia has two sons". Considering the influence of US writers such as Richard Ford, William Maxwell, Raymond Carver on him, how important is being Norwegian to him? "Every Norwegian has this thing about living in a cabin, with about 10 books, enough food, enough clothes, enough firewood, a gun - it's [ Knut] Hamsun's Pan. Living the clean life . . . I'm Norwegian." Does he feel good in his life? "As long as I can run, I feel okay."
Out Stealing Horses, by Per Petterson, is published in paperback by Vintage, €12