Out Stealing Horses: A Novel | Per Petterson | Brilliant. A reader's delight.

Out Stealing Horses: A Novel | Per Petterson | We decide for Ourselves when it will Hurt

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Out Stealing Horse...

	Out Stealing Horses: A Novel Per Petterson Graywolf Press, 2007 - 250 pages average customer review:based on 111 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Brilliant. A reader's delight.

There are few books I've read in the past ten years that touched me as this one did. The character is masterfully portrayed, the language splendid and the elegiac tone perfectly suits the story and perspective. A book of enormous compassion and insight into the human condition.

We decide for Ourselves when it will Hurt

In a scene early in Per Petterson's novel, an adolescent boy named Trond Sander is mowing hay with a scythe in the company of his father. Trond comes to a patch of nettles and is afraid to cut them even with the scythe. His father then pulls the nettles up with his bare hands. He instructs Trond with the words that are the title of this review. It is a lesson that Trond ultimately learns for himself during the course of this book.

"Out Stealing Horses" is set in rural and remote east Norway. The book is told in the first person by Trond who in 1999 at age 67 has moved to a primitive cabin in the woods to find peace, solitude, and an opportunity for reflection. The time frame moves back and forth between Trond's chosen life in the cabin and the events of his adolescence in the late 1940s. The earlier period of the narrative centers on Trond's relationship with his father, a relationship which involves both love and deep dissapointment.

The book moves slowly, deliberately, and with understatement. Much of the story is told through indirection. Trond offers important hints of the course of his life between his adolescence and his retirment to solititude, but much is left unsaid. In his stay in the woods, Trond meets a neighbor named Lars who also pursues a quiet, solitary life. Lars was the brother of Trond's childhood friend, Jon, and the stories of the two men are intertwined as Trond recollects and tells his story.

The book includes descriptive passages of the rivers, lakes and woods of Norway and Sweden and of the harshness of the winters and of the difficult work of rural life. The book includes several intricate subplots, including accounts of Trond's father's work in the resistance movement during WW II, and a story of the hazards of harvesting timber and floating it downstream. The stories build slowly and are interwoven skillfully. Petterson develops the parallels between Trond's adolescence and his life as an elderly man.

Trond spends his evenings in his cabin with his dog Lyra and with rereading Charles Dickens. The novels "David Copperfield" and "A Tale of Two Cities" get considerable attention in this book as Trond relates them to the story he himself has to tell. The reader is given a glimpse of Trond's apparently successful career, of his failed first marriage and of his awkward relationship with his two daughters when his elder daughter Ellen pays him a surprise visit. Trond also offers a revealing scene of one of his relationships between his first and second marriages. A woman whose name Trond cannot remember was knitting him a scarf and mittens. Trond remembers only the click of this former lover's knitting needles as her ways were quiet and calm. "It was all too low key for me" he observes "and the relationship dwindled into nothing."

This novel takes some patience to read. The form of the book, in terms of a first person narrator interweaving stories of present and past has been overrused in recent novels, but Petterson uses it effectively here. This book encourages reflection upon love, human contact, and pain, and upon their relationship to the nature of independence and self-reliance.

Robin Friedman

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A Tale Of A Man And A Boy

Per Peterson's novel, "Out Stealing Horses," tells a story I will not soon forget. A boy's summer with his father at their country seems sufused with light, bright and warm in the clearings and filtered through trees in the forest. Days are filled with adventure with a friend and the feelings of satisfaction and sweet tiredness after a successful job requiring hard labour, all bolstered by his love of, and complete trust in, his father. An unexpected and tragic event destroys this idyl, and the boy begjns to see the despair and potential life changing decisions and tragedies that were lurking behind the cloudless stage setting of his life. In the rest of the novel, we see the boy growing to manhood and eventually seeing and accepting life as it is.

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hooked from the start

This is a book for people who read for language, the turn of phrase as well as the story. I read this in 16 hours. There is a mystery in the atmosphere of this book compelling the reader to read on.. My first Norwegian translalation. A worthy read.

reviews: 1, 2, 3, page 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13

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