Since he was 18 years old, Per Petterson (Oslo, 1952) was clear that he had to be a writer. Interested then in the working class, he tried to reflect this world in some novels that he assures that "they seemed literature, but they were not". He was beginning to be desperate: “If I hadn't been a writer, I would have become a wretch. I started writing about what I knew, my family, but at the same time it wasn't mine." Already 35 years old, he managed to publish his first book, which he has followed a dozen.
He has been in Barcelona for a few days at the invitation of the CCCB, taking advantage of the fact that Club Editor has just published M'hi nego in Catalan (translated by Carolina Moreno), and that Asteroid has reissued Salir a Steal Caballos in Spanish (with a new translation by Cristina Gómez Baggethun ; in Catalan it was published by the 2016 Club Editor).
Going out to steal horses was the book with which he gained international recognition in 2003, thanks to which it has already been translated into fifty languages. He confesses that it was an “easy to write” book: “Somehow, it came to me. I was at my father-in-law's house and he told me a childhood memory of his, when in 1948 he went to a cabin with his father. Curiously, most of what I explain in the book has not happened to him, but he says that he is the protagonist. The writer does not hide that it is a book that has made him "earn a lot of money."
In this return to the past he portrays the swing between childhood and adulthood, understanding that "the past is a foreign country, where they do things differently", and that is why when you go into it "perhaps you find things that you don't like ”.
Also in M'hi nego there is a journey between the past and the present, here with two old friends, Jim and Tommy, and the latter's sister, Siri, for whom a long time has passed. In the middle, a violent father that Petterson remembers where he came from: “One day I saw how a neighbor kicked his son and made him fly into the air. He impressed me a lot.”
The family question has a lot of weight in his work: "Because the family can be a dangerous place, but it can also be pleasant, and my books express it." When he started publishing, his family didn't say anything to him: “I don't know what they thought. Maybe they didn't have the words to say it”, but in 1991 his parents and his little brother died in a fire and now he can no longer know what they think of his literature.
In any case, he assures that he does not write with a program in mind: "I don't explore topics, I write books."
Catalan version, here
