03 Dec 2012 23:58:20
According to Dr Fjeldbo in Henrik Ibsen's The League of Youth, the troublesome short-sightedness afflicting mankind can be remedied by donning "the spectacles of experience" through which "you'll see more clearly a second time". Ibsen's fellow Norwegian Per Petterson sees things differently: traumatised by the violent events that have blighted his childhood years, Audun, the young protagonist of It's Fine By Me, shields his eyes behind a pair of old sunglasses for weeks on end, creating a protective barrier between himself and the world. There are some experiences which we see all too clearly the first time around. Dimming reality's harsh glare, Audun's sunglasses offer a way of distancing and obscuring the things he cannot face. Petterson's novel is a compelling study in these defences, in the ways in which we avoid and suppress. Audun lives alone with his mother in 1970s, working-class Oslo, filling his out-of-school hours with newspaper rounds, weightlifting, and long talks about Hemingway and Jack London with his friend Arvid. Although Audun has left his sunglasses behind by the time we meet him as a 17-year-old, there are still events of which he will not speak: his father's drunken episodes and the violence that comes with them, the time he spent living in cardboard boxes down by the railway, his brother's untimely death. Like Audun's father, who lives rough in the pine forests surrounding Oslo, these moments constantly threaten to invade Audun's everyday existence; he responds with silence, preoccupying himself with books and walking the dismal confines of the city's concrete suburbs.
Far from being a novel about closure, It's Fine By Me explores the troubling apathy that accompanies Audun's attempts to avoid his past. Unlike Arvid, who uses revolutionary literature as inspiration for the uprisings he leads at school, Audun's books inspire no such action: his ambitions of becoming a writer go unrealised, and he leaves school to take on a thankless printing job. Petterson's beautifully spare prose subtly captures the effort that comes with this seeming inaction, this lack of fight, providing us with a lens through which we come to see Audun's grim inertia as a paralysing struggle to forget the past and get on with the task of living.
