Men in My Situation by Per Petterson

Friday, Dec. 9, 2022--San Antonio

Men in My Situation by Per Petterson is a novel by a Norwegian author which has been translated into English.  It was listed as a top book of 2022 by the New York Public Library.  I knew going into it that it would be "different" from what I had read about it.  It is a story of the thoughts and interactions with others of a depressed man over a period of about 6 months that follows a year that has been terrible for him--a year in which his parents and two of his remaining 3 siblings have perished in a ferry fire and then his wife, who was already unhappy in the marriage but has stayed with him for a year because of the first tragedy, finally leaves him taking their 3 daughters with her.  He thinks back through all that has happened as well as describing what is now happening in his life.  He is a successful and well-known author of 3 books who is writing his fourth, but he comes from a working class background and has little in common with the "beautiful people" who his wife has associated with more and more as time has passed.  They have never really become friends of his.  It becomes obvious to both him and the reader that his life has been going off the rails for some time and is continuing to do so during the current time of the story.  He has cut himself off from his lifelong best friend.  His wife, after only about 3 months since leaving him, cuts him off from seeing his children on a regular basis.  He drinks at bars and picks up anonymous women for a night of sex which is usually non-satisfactory.  Only one person, a married women who lives with her husband across the hall from his apartment, seems to show any concern for how he is doing as his life spirals downward.  Because he is an author, he has no work colleagues, so he spends hours traveling around places (both in Oslo and in the surrounding countryside as far as a town across the border in Sweden) he remembers from his past.  Beginning as a very slow read which almost made me quit the novel, patterns slowly develop as the random memories described begin to fit together.  The result is that I read more and more pages each day as I became emotionally invested in his life.  I gave the book 4 stars out of 5.