It's Fine By Me
Written by Per Petterson
Narrated by Adam Verner
4/5
()
Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this audiobook
Fans of Per Petterson will be delighted by this opportunity to observe Arvid Jansen in his youth from a fresh perspective. In It's Fine By Me, Arvid befriends a boy named Audun. On Audun's first day of school, he refuses to talk or take off his sunglasses; there are stories he would prefer to keep to himself. Audun lives with his mother in a working-class district of Oslo. He delivers newspapers and talks for hours about Jack London and Ernest Hemingway with Arvid. But he's not sure that school is the right path for him and feels that life holds other possibilities. Sometimes tender, sometimes brutal, It's Fine By Me is a brilliant novel from an acclaimed author.
Per Petterson
Per Petterson is the author of five previous novels, which established him as one of Norway's best fiction writers. Petterson worked as a manual laborer, spent twelve years as a bookseller, and was a translator and literary critic before becoming a full-time writer. His novel Out Stealing Horses won the 2007 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and was named one of the best books of 2007 by the New York Times Book Review and Time.
More audiobooks from Per Petterson
Out Stealing Horses Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes: Stories Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5To Siberia Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I Refuse Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5It's Fine By Me Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsI Curse the River of Time Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5
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Reviews for It's Fine By Me
79 ratings9 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I like Petterson's style, and although I don't think this is his best book, I still found it very enjoyable. His characters are very introspective and observant about their relationships. The main character is only young, but he speaks with a mature voice and this is certainly not YA genre. It's been about 40 years since I read it, but "It's Fine By Me" reminded me a lot of Camus' "The Outsider". Petterson is about my age and he writes about his own times (this is set in the Vietnam War days, when Petterson was a teenager) which is another reason that I found resonance with his story.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Basically I was wrong about thinking this an inferior work by Per Petterson. It was simply not what I like to read, but it was very well-written and well worth my time. There is much to like about this book and anything I might have to say about it would ruin the experience for somebody else so inclined to read it. But whatever anyone decides to do is fine by me.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5At first blush, this is a heartbreaking coming-of-age novel, which takes place in a small town in Norway. When we meet Auden, he is 13. It is his first day at school and he is late. He is rude to the headmaster and then to his teacher. He is wearing sunglasses and refuses to take them off. He says he has terrible scars around his eyes. He is a loner, a bit of a fibber, and a storyteller when he wants to avoid something. He seems to always be running away from something, perhaps from himself and his thoughts. He seems like a very angry, and perhaps unhappy, young man. His glasses symbolize only one of the things he hides behind. In order to conceal who he really is, he wears odd outfits. His lies are another way of hiding. His air of bravado overshadows his fears and hides his sensitive nature. He carries himself with a chip on his shoulder, sometimes has violent outbursts and shows very little alarm when confronted. He takes orders from no one and follows his own drummer. He is definitely his own person, although in private, he is not as brash as he seems. He can be emotional, philosophical and cerebral, in spite of his, often antisocial, behavior. He entertains dreams of being a writer and loves to read, devouring books when he can, even attempting to write something beautiful himself. At the playground, on this first day at school, he unexpectedly makes a friend, Arvid, someone who passes muster with him and who becomes a confidant. As the timeline moves around, we learn, through Auden’s thoughts and memories, that his father was very abusive, a drunk and a brute. His brother has drowned in an accident and his sister has run off with her boyfriend. He and his mother live together, and he has newspaper routes to augment their income. As the years pass, Auden’s life is one of survival on a daily basis: survival at home, survival outside on the streets, survival at school, survival at work. He has a quick temper and often makes split second decisions that are not well thought out. Always, lurking in the background, there is a disaster waiting to happen, and yet, the story never seems contrived, rather it seems authentic in the realm in which it is being played out, a small, unsophisticated, perhaps a bit backward, Norwegian town, filled with poorly educated, unworldly characters, who work very hard to make ends meet, are often bullies and sometimes take the law into their own hands. It is a place where the weak sometimes prey upon the poor.Although Petterson seems to present a simple message, using the matter-of-course occurrences of everyday life in this rural environment, his message is always profound. Often, after reading several sentences or paragraphs or pages, there is a moment of awareness and a larger message comes through to the reader. It isn’t just about a boy who works to help support his mother, it is about a boy who does many things to try and discover who he is, what his purpose in life will be and how will he attain it. It is about the characters’ philosophy of acceptance about what befalls them, as in the title, all things are fine with them, they believe that things will work out, in the end. Auden manages to bear all of the crises he has to face, and he bears them well. The reader is always wondering how he will deal with what comes his way, but he faces his ordeals and his pain like a champion. Petterson turns the events of a simple, ordinary day into a magical moment, worthy of further thought, and he makes painful events easier to bear and understand, simply with his writing style which is so easy and comfortable to read. In conclusion, this is a novel of hope as well as despair. The writer leaves the door open for both.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I received this book as a Goodreads ARC giveaway. This was a great book and I really enjoy it
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5At the age of thirteen Audun moves with his family, but without his father, to a working class area on the east of Oslo. Audun is self assured but reserved, and already had determined how he will conduct himself inn his new home. Almost despite himself he strikes up a close friendship with fellow schoolboy and near neighbour, Arvid, a friendship that will see him through the rest of his schooling.The novel follows Audun to his nineteenth year, by which time just he lives with his mother, while the shadow of his father still lurks somewhere. Both Audun and Arvid are independent thinkers, and neither is the sort to take the course of inaction, so it is not surprising they get in the odd scrape. But is is clear that while he rubs many up the wrong way, Audun endears himself to some of his neighbours as well of some of the those with whom he works - as no doubt he will to the reader.It's Fine By Me is a relatively short read, but far from short in content and impact. Characters are well drawn and convincing, and it is this that really makes if it so fully engaging.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Audun Sletten is an angry young man. He has just buried his younger brother and his abusive, drunken father has abandoned the family, which forces him to work in menial jobs at far too young of an age. He is also considering dropping out of school and is becoming increasingly alienated from most of his friends and associates. He has very little in life and sees very little chance to improve his lot in the future. Indeed, as the protagonist in Per Petterson’s superb character study It’s Fine By Me, Audun’s sole dream is to become a writer capable of producing “the one perfect sentence” that Hemingway spoke of.Whether he ever reaches that goal is something the reader never learns—the events described in the story move between Audun’s experiences at 13 and 18 years of age—but that hardly matters. Petterson’s spare and powerful prose paints an enormously compelling portrait of disaffected working class youth, very much in the tradition of the great British novels exploring the same theme. (In fact, Petterson tips his hat to that lineage with a specific reference to Alan Sillitoe’s wonderful Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.) In particular, the author has managed to create a character about whom we come to care deeply, even if we never quite learn to like him. Above all else, though, this surely qualifies as the most ironically titled book in recent memory: given the way his life has gone so far, absolutely nothing is fine with Audun.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Possibly autobiography as novel, it grabbed me and wouldn't let go. Bartlett's translation reads wonderfully, but so did all the other hands I have read translating Petterson's other novels, which strongly suggests it's the author's voice that gets inside my head. It's a family story (like all his others) but also about being a boy and becoming a man in a certain era and a certain context that is now gone forever, like the industry in which the narrator goes to work, terrifyingly presented in sections that illustrate what it means to work with big, dangerous, machinery that constitutes its own environment, technological, social and political at the same time. The great thing about Petterson is that he gets you interested in characters who aren't nice, who are in fact a pain the arse and often act like idiots to themselves. This was an early novel of his and it does show in places, though it's still great to read. Finished it in 48 hours. All his novels get 5* from me, I don't uinderstand why anyone would give them less.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I liked this sweet little novel more than I thought I would: it's about not much of anything. Not much action. Not much happening at all. Lots of description. But I cared about this protagonist, a teen trying to make his way in a confusing and unhelpful world, trying to sort our relationships, trying to be a man, not always succeeding. The writing was lovely. Although I am incapable of reading the book in its original language, it seems to me that the translator did a wonderful job with the author's words.For those times when you want a short, reflective story, when you don't need great gobs of action or mystery, when you want something touching but not maudlin, this fills the bill.Thank you to the publisher for providing me with a copy of this book.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5What was it like to be a teenager in Oslo in 1970? For Audun Sletten, it's not a particularly pleasant life. He's a sullen young man, prone to drunkenness and apathy, and already quite defeated for one so young. We learn some of what made him that way as he alternates between present and past tense, telling stories from his 13th year in 1965 and his 18th year in 1970.I have very much enjoyed some of Per Petterson's other novels, but I had to force myself to finish this one. The prose is up to Petterson's usual standards and the translation is excellent, but IT'S FINE BY ME is essentially plotless. The 1970 Audun drinks a lot, gets in fights, wanders the city aimlessly, and plays at radical politics. He goes to school, then drops out to take a dead-end job where he can't seem to stay out of trouble. He grieves for a lost brother, and lives in fear of the return of his abusive, alcoholic father. Audun's stories from 1965 give us more insight into the family dynamics that made him the way he is. I enjoyed the stories from his younger self a little more because he hadn't yet given up on the world and himself. He was still participating and trying to enjoy life.If you've read IN THE WAKE and I CURSE THE RIVER OF TIME, you'll enjoy seeing Arvid Jansen as a youngster in this book. He's Audun's only friend, and he was the one bright spot in the story for me. Arvid sees Audun for what he truly is. He tells him, "Do you know something, Audun. Nothing's fine by you. Absolutely nothing." And he's right. We can only hope Audun will overcome some of his anger and stop keeping the world at bay. Otherwise he's doomed to remain miserable and directionless.Those with a low tolerance for foul language may want to steer clear of this novel. The cursing is not excessive, but it's realistically regular throughout the book.