I Curse the River of Time by Per Petterson

You have to like sparse writing and a dispassionate approach to life to really love this book. If you do, it is fabulous.
In Petterson's world, the past is always commingled with the present. Normally this layering feels like a pleasing echo—the harmony of what was with what it is. As a parent is dying, however, time's score can become an unraveling dissonance. It certainly is so for Arvid Jansen, the thirty-seven-year-old hero of Per Petterson's new novel. Dealing with his mother's imminent demise requires him to act like an adult; facing her loss makes him, irrevocably, into a child. 'I Curse the River of Time' traces the tension between these two movements with a Norwegian resonance. Jansen's mother is diagnosed with cancer in 1989; he narrates the story from some distant point in the future; and the book circles back toward Jansen's childhood, as if to discover, in his recollections, a clue to why he never has entirely grown up.
Jansen's mother, no doubt, is part of the problem. She looms large in this tale. Stern, staunchly intelligent, unbowed by hard factory labor, she views her sons—of whom there are three, once four—as spoilt children, to whom everything was handed. After her diagnosis is revealed she lights up a cigarette. Then she books passage on a night-ferry to Denmark and the summer home of Arvid's childhood. It is November and bitterly cold.
Approaching a grief like this doesn't make us better; it only makes us more ourselves. As we fall back into Jansen's memories, he comes across as an awkward, needy boy who cried at movies and flung himself dumbly at Communism in his young adulthood to impress his mother. He even gets a factory job to become a better communist. I Curse the River of Time, the book's title, comes from a poem by Mao, whose portrait Jansen hung above his bed alongside those of Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell.
Similarly, flinging himself into this journey is what he feels he ought to do when a mother is sick. The longer Jansen stays, though, the more he realizes he has once again inserted himself back into her life. He works hard to have meaningful moments, and at last they come by accident.
Petterson has captured the way a parent's death feels personal. An extension of prior betrayals, it can seem like the final one. These are not a son's finest moments. Flailing, drunk, self-absorbed, it's hard to warm up to Jansen. He wants desperately to be acknowledged. It's impossible not to feel for him, though. And to want to say, stay still: the worst is yet to come. The book is filled with many an unpleasant truth, which can either be a cautionary tale, or wisdom. You choose.