Draw Breath

I have just finished the incredible In the Wake by Per Petterson. Petterson won this year's IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for Out Stealing Horses. In the Wake is at least semi-autobiographical in that it describes the Scandanavian Star disaster of 1990, the disaster in which a number of Petterson's own family died. The book is a meditation on loss but is not without moments of comedy. We meet the main character lapsing into an all to common breakdown on the streets of his home town. Such is his despair at not possessing enough money to buy a fizzy drink in his local shop that the shop assistant simply gives it to him without question.

Grief on the loss of his much loved family members has rendered life unbearably heavy; even the weight of his own body seems too much. Six years on from the tragedy, his life is still a waking nightmare; dreams and vsions intersperse the book. The book reminds me of some of Thomas Hardy's most poignant poems on grief; the mist of Hardy here being replaced by vast snowscapes. There is no one moment of recovery, simply a series of false starts which somehow propel the narrator back to some kind of normality. The incongruousness of some of these false starts is not lost on him, whether in a moment of sheer panic while in flagrante or while being told to keep driving during a snow storm.

In the Wake may not have got any major awards but in the tradition of all great books, it lingers and changes in the mind long after a first reading.