Fire and Ice.(Per Petterson's novels)

On April 7, 1990, the ferryboat Scandinavian Star sailed from Oslo toward Frederikshavn, in the northern part of Denmark, carrying nearly five hundred passengers. The ship caught fire, and more than a hundred and fifty people perished. Four of the dead belonged to the family of the Norwegian novelist Per Petterson: his mother and father, a younger brother, and the niece of another brother.

Petterson was thirty-seven at the time, a mildly successful writer who was unknown beyond Scandinavia. It took him nearly ten years to come face to face with this catastrophe, and the result was "In the Wake," whose narrator, a forty-three-year-old novelist, experiences a similar calamity. The voice is at times grief-stricken, at times helpless; the narrator tells us that when he watched the doomed ship on television "suddenly my feet felt icy cold. A paralysing cold which hurt." Frequently, he sounds overheated, not quite rational, almost like one of Petterson's literary ancestors, the young man of Knut Hamsun's "Hunger": "The brown Coke spurts out of the nozzle all over my trousers, my shoes and the newspaper. I start to weep. I have been on my way down for a long time, and now I am there."

Petterson hadn't written anything like that before, and never has again, but some of the moods of "In the Wake"--its pressing sense of imminent loss and abandonment--are very much part of two other fine novels, "Out Stealing Horses," published in America last year to much acclaim, and "To Siberia" (Graywolf; $22), which is just out here. What happened to the Scandinavian Star seems to have transformed Petterson as a novelist; although there is no mention of the ship's fire in his other books, it burns on every page.

"To Siberia," first published in Norway twelve years ago, is not an easy book; the story jumps around in time and place, and not much happens for long stretches. The narrator, who is said to be based on Petterson's mother, a Dane, is a woman of sixty. She recalls her life from the nineteen-thirties, when she was six or seven, until she was an unwed mother in her early twenties. Her family lives in the northern part of Jutland, the Danish peninsula--"as far as it was possible to travel from Copenhagen and still have streets to walk along"--where her father, an expert joiner, "works his way downward" until his business goes into hock. Her mother writes and sings hymns, which the daughter can't stand. "She has one foot on earth and one in heaven," she says, without affection.

Life at home is forbidding, and the mood is not lightened by a grandfather who is subject to periodic rages, drinking binges, and, as it turns out, suicidal impulses. The girl's isolation worsens when a school friend--the headmaster's daughter--dies of some mysterious ailment. The only one who truly understands her is Jesper, her brother, who is three years older, and we begin to worry about his fate from the moment we're informed that "he has been dead for more than half my life." The bond between Jesper and "Sistermine," as he calls her, is tender and powerful; their connection--an intense sibling love that, briefly, uncomfortably, seems to veer toward something else--is part of what gives "To Siberia" its curious hold.

Jesper and his sister, not surprisingly, imagine other places, distant ones. For her, it is Siberia, with "open skies that were cold and clear, where it was easy to breathe and easy to see for long distances." For Jesper, it is Morocco, and "his pictures were mysterious and alluring in black and white with barren mountains in the far distance and sun-scorched faces and sun-scorched towns." Their own small town, which seems to serve as a way station to the fashionable beaches at Skagen, at the northernmost tip of Jutland, envelops them just as surely as the long winter nights.

Scandinavian literature was ...