Brotherly Love

Early in to Siberia, a new novel by Per Petterson (Graywolf Press; 245 pages), the narrator and her older brother cut their hands and mix their blood. It's a familiar childhood ritual, sweetened by naive redundancy: How much closer than siblings can you be? The bond between this sister and brother turns out to be a love story--pure, but as painful as the touch of steel to skin.

Petterson, a Norwegian writer, won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award last year for his novel Out Stealing Horses, as well as an even more elusive prize for a work in translation: critical acclaim in the U.S. The novel's success was all the more surprising given the quiet nature of Petterson's storytelling. His characters live mostly inside their heads; outside, they can be found in small villages in Scandinavia, drinking, chopping wood, fighting, reading, remembering. It's hardly the stuff of flashy, cosmopolitan fiction-without-borders.

But if his books seem modest in scope, their power lies in the way he sculpts calamity into catharsis. His novel In the Wake is a raw portrait of grief based on the tragedy of Petterson's adult life: the death of his parents and two brothers in a ferry accident. The opening of Out Stealing Horses climaxes in a scene in which a 10-year-old boy accidentally shoots and kills his twin brother. The event stops your heart, but Petterson's lyrical prose pulls you forward.

To Siberia is rougher around the edges. The precipitating horror--the narrator's grandfather hangs himself--creates a strangely shallow impression. But what the story lacks in polish, it makes up for in mood. Reading a Petterson novel is like falling into a northern landscape painting--all shafts of light and clear, palpable chill. The narrator and her brother Jesper grow up in this setting, on a farm in Denmark in the 1930s. Distant from their parents, they find happiness in each other, and as the narrator grows from tagalong sister to adolescent, Petterson gives their relationship a delicate physical dimension.

That closeness is one of the things brutalized when the Nazis arrive. Here, as in Out Stealing Horses, the war is remarkable not only for its general devastation but also for the way it detonates private passions: Jesper's for his resistance work, and the narrator's for Jesper's companionship and safety. This has the potential to turn out bleak. But the thing that sticks is the adoring trust sister places in brother, whether she's a child sneaking out with him via rooftop at night ("I'm not scared, and I just do what he does, it is not difficult when we do it in time with each other, he goes first and I follow"), a young woman trying to match his daring or an old woman narrating the memory of her love for him.