A Scandinavian son faces loss and regret

In Petterson’s heartbreaking “Out Stealing Horses,’’ we saw Trond Sander struggling to understand why his father had abandoned his family. The adult Sander is so devastated that he moves to a cabin: “I lost interest in talking to people,’’ he explains, and Petterson’s novel becomes a kind of gradual thawing. In his latest, “I Curse the River of Time,’’ Petterson explores the distant relationship between a mother dying of cancer and her adult son. Petterson’s narrator is Arvid Jansen, who hears that his mother is dying right in the middle of his own divorce. Arvid is rendered almost catatonic: “No act of will would get me out of this state. . . . At times, the only option was to sit in a chair and wait for the worst ravages to calm down so I could perform the most basic tasks, to cut a slice of bread, to go to the toilet.’’

As in “Out Stealing Horses,’’ Petterson’s narrative interweaves the past and present, both converging at the end in a way that seems inevitable and deeply satisfying. As a college student, Arvid had become a communist and then quit college to join the proletariat in factory work. His incensed mother, already working a dead-end factory job, had responded by calling him an idiot. Arvid becomes a study in alienation, learning to suppress his own pain: “I could swallow whatever hit me and let it sink as if nothing had happened . . . it looked like what I was doing had a purpose, but it did not.’’