I Curse the River of Time/Per Petterson: Reflections

They sit together now, on the edge of my desk:  Out Stealing Horses, To Siberia, and I Curse the River of Time.  They are the novels of Per Petterson, an author born in Oslo and translated around the world, a man whose work draws the almost impossibly delicate balance between the deeply specific and the mesmerizingly vague.  Petterson's characters recreate the past, live the past, want to change it; they cannot.  Their present ticks toward the future, which is to say it ticks toward death.  N...