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 98 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

We were going out stealing horses. That was what he said, standing at the door to the cabin where I was spending the summer with my father. I was fifteen. It was 1948 and oneof the first days of July.

Trond?s friend Jon often appeared at his doorstep with an adventure in mind for the two of them. But this morning was different. What began as a joy ride on ?borrowed? horses ends with Jon falling into a strange trance of grief. Trond soon learns what befell Jon earlier that day?an incident that marks the beginning of a series of vital losses for both boys.

Set in the easternmost region of Norway, Out Stealing Horses begins with an ending. Sixty-seven-year-old Trond has settled into a rustic cabin in an isolated area to live the rest of his life with a quiet deliberation. A meeting with his only neighbor, however, forces him to reflect on that fateful summer.

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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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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.

Trond Needs a Good Kick in the Rear

I don't know if it was the translator or Per Petterson, but one of them captured Hemingway's rhythm almost perfectly. This is the main character, Trond Sander describing how his father, some neighbors and he cut trees to be floated downstream to a Swedish lumber mill: "...when you are in the swing, and all of you have fallen into a good rhythm, the beginning and the end have no meaning at all, not there, not then, and the only vital thing is that you keep going until everything merges into a single pulse that beats and works under its own steam, and you take a break at the right time and you work again, and you eat enough but not too much, and you drink enough but not too much, and sleep well when the times comes; eight hours at night, and at least one hour during the day."

Nothing much happens in the story. Trond, a sixty-seven-year old man moves to a cabin north of Oslo. His wife has recently died and he wants to be alone, but he meets a man named Lars who turns out to be somebody he knows from his youth. The story flashes back to the last time Trond had seen his father, who eventually left his family. The story flashes further back to the time Trond's father fought for the Norwegian resistance during World War II. And that's how he met Lars' mother, whom he would leave his family for. Then there's the curious statement "Out stealing horses," which was a code for a messenger carrying papers between Germany and Sweden. It was the same expression Lars' brother Jon used when he and Trond would go to a neighbor's corral and ride the horses there, pretending to be stealing them. Jon was so consumed by the horses and other mischief that he forgot he was supposed to watch his little brothers and there was a terrible accident.

The adult Trond Sanders is a moody, moody man who is more consumed by his father's abandonment than he is by his family. When his daughter comes to see him, he's not even sure he wants to see her. He relates better to his dog, Lyra, than he does to human beings. We know Trond was married and has two daughters but we learn nothing about his wife and the other daughter is invisible.

Readers will be frustrated by the lack of resolution. We assume Trond's father raised Lars, but we never find out for sure. Trond seems afraid to ask. Perhaps Trond is hesitant because he doesn't want to establish a human relationship with Lars. Although Lars recognizes Trond and vice versa, they spend an entire afternoon sawing a tree that has fallen in Trond's yard, but their conversation is never more significant than a discussion of the weather. Petterson seemed to be aiming for emotional impact rather than story resolution. I did feel sorry for Trond, but I also wanted to kick him in the butt.

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