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I used the burning ship as a shield, I was shameless, I’m wounded, I said, that’s why.”īut for every instance of Arvid deliberately weaponizing his trauma, there are numerous others when he doesn’t know why he’s doing the things he does. When he finds himself unable to please a woman who has taken him home, Arvid plays “the highest card I had in the pack.

In many instances, grief makes a cad of Arvid. While all of Petterson’s books are concerned with grief, in “Men in My Situation,” the author seems particularly interested in the uses to which suffering can be put, the ways it can be marshaled for personal gain as well as the corrosive effect it can have on relationships. Or he drives around in his Mazda, or sits at home smoking unfiltered Blue Master cigarettes and listening to Mahler’s funeral march, the dotted rhythms of which would form a good soundtrack for the scenes of everyday frailty and futility that fill the novel. He searches for a trace of himself in Turid’s new home but finds nothing, noticing only a familiar cabinet she had painted “an insistent blue, to remove all memories.” So he goes out at night, wandering among Oslo’s bars looking for distraction or affection. But Arvid thinks, “Nothing that I had written pointed towards Hamsun, not as I saw it.”Īrvid has split with his wife, Turid, who now lives with their daughters. “Well hello there Knut Hamsun,” old friends say as he enters the bar. Even in the city where he’s spent his whole life, he is out of place, his sensibility somewhat askew. Petterson’s eighth novel, translated by Ingvild Burkey, tells the story of Arvid Jansen, a 38-year-old father of three girls and a writer who dwells in a state of perpetual bewilderment.

So it is with some skepticism that a woman book critic in the year 2022 picks up a novel called “Men in My Situation” about an aloof, sullen, recently divorced man approaching middle age.įortunately, this one is written by Per Petterson, a master at capturing internal tumult, family relationships and the vicissitudes of grief and a novelist whose men are never simple. Wife left you after years of emotional neglect to care for your children alone? Cry me a river.

Drinking and womanizing got you down? Boo hoo. We’re living in a moment of depleted patience for the beleaguered man. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores.