To Siberia

In Norwegian author Per Petterson’s novel To Siberia (1996), translated into English in 1998 by Anne Born and first published in the US in 2008, the unnamed 60-year-old narrator looks back on her youth in Denmark during the 1930s and ’40s, focusing on her charismatic brother, Jesper, a committed socialist who joins the Resistance during the Nazi occupation. To Siberia is a “spare, lyrical” novel (Kirkus Reviews) from the author of Out Stealing Horses (2007).

We never learn the current circumstances of the novel’s unnamed narrator. Instead, we learn about her early life, from the 1930s when she was six or seven, until her early twenties.

The narrator grows up in a port town in the northern part of Jutland, a remote place surrounded by even more remote farming villages. Her stern, hunchbacked, and loving father, Magnus, is a skilled joiner but an unskillful businessman. The family’s finances are always precarious. Her mother is a pious Christian, who spends most of her time brooding and some of the time singing hymns of her own composition. The narrator’s paternal grandfather is a major presence in her early life. The moody, erratic old farmer lives nearby.



The most important person in the narrator’s life, however, is her older brother Jesper. A charismatic, lively, provocative presence from a young age, the narrator devotes many pages to loving descriptions of his pranks and daredevilry. Jesper follows the town lamplighter on his rounds, extinguishing each lamp as soon as it is lit. When it storms, Jesper runs outside to dance. He skates across a treacherous frozen sea to the lighthouse. As a young teenager, he becomes enamored of socialist politics and begins harassing the local baron: “I’m no peasant, I’m a proletarian.”

Jesper is close to the narrator, whom he calls “Sistermine,” and the two of them have a rich, shared fantasy life. In 1934, their father takes them on a holiday to the beach. The holiday is disappointing, but the children begin to dream of travel. Jesper picks Morocco as his destination of choice, while the narrator chooses Siberia. Together they memorize the towns and cities of their respective destinations, and Jesper defends his sister’s fantasy whenever people try to tell her that Siberia is a miserable place, synonymous with prison camps.

The family’s life begins a downward slide when the children’s grandfather hangs himself in one of his cowsheds. His note explains, “I can’t go on any longer.”



The children have always been told that their father chose the town life of a carpenter over working on his father’s farm, but now they learn the true story. Their grandfather forced Magnus off the farm, and now their father will inherit nothing. Their father has long depended on one day inheriting his share in the farm, and his financial situation begins to unravel, compounded by his bitterness over being cut out by his father. His joinery shop fails, and the family moves into a dairy, which Marie runs to support them.

The narrator, by now in middle school, has her first kiss with a classmate, Ruben, who is Jewish. Her romantic escapades are pallid in comparison with those of Jesper, however, who is handsome, smart, and breathtakingly reckless. At 14, he is openly a Communist. He gets into bar fights. The town’s young women “lie in bed at night and think of him.” He can even make their sour, religious mothers “blush.”

Jesper leaves school and is apprenticed to a printer. He wants to fight for the International Brigade in Spain but accepts that he is too young. He gets his chance to fight, however, when the Germans arrive. Virtually everyone the narrator knows joins the Resistance, in which Jesper is a major figure, fighting and executing German soldiers. Meanwhile, the narrator takes pity on a German who is drowning and saves him.



Finally, the Gestapo moves in, suppressing resistance. Jesper joins Ruben’s family in a daring escape to Sweden.

The narrator’s parents decide they don’t want her to get a Nazi education and remove her from school. Instead, she begins the first in a long series of menial jobs. Already she misses her brother desperately, feeling that life is pallid without him.

The war ends, and the narrator drifts to Copenhagen, then on to Stockholm and Oslo, working as a telephone operator or a waitress. Poor and friendless, she relies on sex for companionship, accepting the advances of her drunken great-uncle, and later, of another woman in exchange for a warm chair to sit in for the night.



By 1947 she is pregnant. Jesper has somehow made it to Morocco, and she has not seen him for four years. She returns home, hoping that she will be reunited with her brother there.

Instead, she encounters her mother, who demands to know whether she is pregnant. When the narrator replies that she is, her mother asks to see her wedding ring. The novel ends on a bleak note, as the narrator recalls thinking at only 23 years old, “There is nothing left in life. Only the rest.”