the where of it

going to siberia (in my mind)

• Posted by Summer Wood on January 21st, 2010 filed in books, places
• 2 Comments »

With all apologies due James Taylor, there’s something powerful about the way a place – even a place you’ve never visited – can stand in for a state of being.

Siberia? I think: Cold. Isolation. Hard labor. Okay, tundra. Maybe caribou.

There are few places in the world I don’t want to go to as much as I don’t want to go to Siberia.

Not so for the unnamed narrator of Per Petterson’s latest novel, TO SIBERIA. Called Sistermine by the brother she adores, she dreams of traveling the vast region by rail, leaving her native Denmark to escape to a place of “open skies that were cold and clear, where it was easy to breathe and easy to see for long distances.”

Like Petterson’s 2007 OUT STEALING HORSES, TO SIBERIA gathers its emotional weight from the intersection of personal life with the rise of the Nazi threat in northern Europe. As her brother becomes increasingly involved in the Resistance movement, her own isolation and disengagement grow more profound as she watches the effect of the war on her parents, her neighbors, her schoolmates, her town.

Many of Petterson’s gifts evident in OUT STEALING HORSES – the later, more mature work – are on display in this novel as well. His long lines, with their unconventional breaks. His descriptions of place, less often as landscape and more as a felt experience of water and rock, a way of breathing, the chill in the bones and sounds carrying down the streets of the town. Some of his images are breathtaking: a fisherman approaches, the holes in his layered wool sweaters overlapping at places; the girl and her brother lie on cows for their warmth, matching their breathing to the animals’ deep respiration.

TO SIBERIA is no match for OUT STEALING HORSES in its psychological acuity, though. For me, there’s something off in the author’s efforts to capture the sexual awakening of a young woman. There’s a kind of narrative flatness in the sex scenes that seems intended to stand in for the character’s overall social estrangement – making them function more as a device and less as a natural outgrowth of who she is.

But when she dreams of Siberia, it’s a place where “the houses are built of timber that gives off the good smell of tar and warmth in summer, and when the long winter sets in the glow stays in the logs and never fades. The wood contracts and waits and stretches out when spring comes and drinks in the wind and the sun.”

That’s sexier than it ever gets in the rest of the novel.

Next up: Ian Frazier goes to the real Siberia – and gets bitten, real bad. Stay tuned.

And for you?  Any place carry a mythic weight?