Although my interest in writing about books generally takes a more analytical bent—diving into an author's bag of tricks, dissecting how an effect was achieved or tracing the iterations of a motif along its winding course—there does occasionally come a book that elicits an unexpectedly more personal reaction, one that overshadows my analytical perceptions for a time, and such a book was Per Petterson's 2003 novel Out Stealing Horses. I hope, eventually, to return to a rather crafty meta-technique used by Petterson, but first I need to tell you about my grandfather.My grandfather was Norwegian. Well, Norwegian-American: he grew up in Portland, Oregon just like I did, and there were a few generations between him and his European ancestors. But his parents were both of solid Norwegian stock, and they preserved a cultural milieu the remnants of which I've observed and heard about many a time, but have never felt evoked in literature quite so perfectly as in Out Stealing Horses. Petterson's narrator, the 67-year-old Trond Sander, is just slightly younger than my grandfather: a matter of three or four years which means the difference between active service in the Second World War, and witnessing the war from the sidelines as an adolescent. Throughout the novel, Trond flashes between his current situation (in retreat in the rural Norwegian forest) back to the summer of 1948, during which he comes to a more adult understanding of what happened during those war years. In the "now" of the novel, however—late autumn of 1999—Trond and Warren would have been contemporaries. And oh, how viscerally Trond reminded me of Warren—and to a lesser extent, my father, and of my whole paternal extended family, and of myself. Here, for example, is Trond explaining how he bought the car for his transition to rural living:The car is a ten-year-old Nissan station wagon, and I could easily have bought a new car, I can afford that, but in addition to the house purchase it would have eaten into my resources quite a lot, so I opted against it. In fact I had plans for a car with four-wheel drive, it would have been useful out here, but then I decided that a four-wheeler was a bit like cheating and a bit new-rich, and I ended up with this one, which has rear-wheel drive like everything else I've driven.Family members reading this: you already see, don't you?? It's not just the financial conservatism, the impulse to save on something that would actually be very useful and is within one's means. (My dad could tell you stories about his father's jerry-rigged lawn mower repairs that could have been fixed for real with the purchase of a few ten-cent washers.) It's not just the fact that Trond ends up with "rear-wheel drive like everything else I've driven," because to change his habits feels "a bit like cheating"—although this also rings true. The similarity actually lies deeper than that, in Trond's very style of narration here: rooted in physical, everyday details; telling a larger story through remarks about engine dynamos and chainsaw-sharpening, through circumspect conversations with car mechanics. There is a reserve here, a protectiveness of one's independence that is remarkably familiar to me. And as when my grandfather severed his Achilles' tendon and taught himself a new mechanics of walking rather than go to the doctor and get it fixed, the stubborn independence of Trond's family extends even to their relationship with pain: "Why not cut down the nettles?" [my father] said. I looked down at the short scythe handle and across at the tall nettles. "It will hurt," I said. Then he looked at me with half a smile and a little shake of the head. "You decide for yourself when it will hurt," he said, suddenly getting serious. He walked over to the nettles and took hold of the smarting plants with his bare hands and began to pull them up with perfect calm, one after the other, throwing them into a heap, and did not stop before he had pulled them all up. Nothing in his face indicated that it hurt...This insistence that "you decide for yourself when it will hurt" becomes both powerful and problematic over the course of Petterson's narrative. (Just like real life: my grandfather could still walk with no Achilles' tendon! On the other hand, he waited so long to go to the doctor that there was no possibility of repairing the tendon in the long run.) Interestingly, Trond's father only ever claims we can decide when something will hurt, not if it will hurt: the characters end up facing the results of putting off that inevitable pain. As I suggested earlier, conversational reserve is a hallmark of practically everyone in Petterson's novel (as it was of my grandfather): these rural Norwegians find ways to enjoy and detest each others' company, but those ways are generally long on physical exertion and short on talk. Petterson evokes several memorable scenes of shared labor and shared leisure: in 1948 Trond and his father help their neighbors with the hay harvest, organize a timber float and go for a several-day-long cross-country horseback ride, while in the present day Trond's neighbor Lars spends the day helping him to cut up a large tree that has fallen across his driveway in a storm. These scenes are full of the Hemingwayesque: physical bodies moving in harmony with each other and with some version of the natural world seen through the lens of necessary labor. Even when circumstances are more propitious for conversation, the assumption is silence, and talk only the rare exception. In this passage, for example, Trond's friend Jon has stopped coming around the cabin he shares with his father:And I did not see him by the river, did not see him with his fishing rod along the bank or in the boat on his way up or down, and my father did not ask me whether we had been out together, and I did not ask my father whether he had seen him. That's the way it was. we just had breakfast, put our working clothes on and went down to the old rowboat that had been included in the purchase of the cottage, and rowed across the water."That's the way it was": although conversations occasionally do manage to break through the boundaries of these characters' reserve, the assumed default is the absence of talk. My grandfather, too, was a reserved man; he did not easily open up to people. And yet my cousins, who both lived with him at various times, tell me that there were times—often late at night, sometimes when he had been drinking—when his words would suddenly become unleashed. And when that happened, according to my cousins, there was no stopping him: he would talk and talk, and they would listen. I thought about these floodgates of words as I made my way through Out Stealing Horses, because I kept expecting that the reserve of some character or other would break in a similar way: that there would be some moment of verbal communication when the barriers would fall away. There isn't. The only long and revealing conversation in the entire book is one we get indirectly—not in the form of dialogue but as a further flashback—and Trond has this conversation with a third party, not his father (the primary person concerned).In thinking back, though, it occurs to me that the book itself, Out Stealing Horses, is itself Trond's late-night flood of talk. The reader doesn't at first realize it, but she is the unwitting recipient of Trond's inner life—a bequest his daughter, for one, would probably appreciate but to which she is never admitted, nor is any other character. This probably happens a lot in first-person narration, that the reader knows more about the narrator than any other character knows. But since verbal restraint and the repression of pain are not always so front-and-center, I am not so much on alert for the point at which a character's reserve will crack. Now, having realized the role that the narrative itself may play for the character Trond (although of course he never explicitly says so), it occurs to me that on a re-read I might focus on what the text has to say about Trond's relationship with his own words. There are several passages in which he mentions talking to himself: is that what he's doing throughout Out Stealing Horses, or is there an implied audience? If he is talking to himself, does the book count as an outpouring of pent-up words in the same way my grandfather's late-night talks to my cousins did? There is nothing to indicate that Trond is actually writing his story down as we're reading it; the narrative feels more like his thoughts, albeit very organized and well-constructed thoughts. Can merely putting one's thoughts in order perform the same function as telling someone a story? Can writing one's thoughts perform that function? These aren't questions that necessarily occupied my mind while reading Petterson, but the intersection of Trond and Warren brings them to mind. Perhaps more personally important, Out Stealing Horses brought to mind my grandfather as he was when I was a ten- or twelve-year-old kid, and that was an unexpected pleasure.
having finished:The story grew on me as it began to center more on the father-son relationship, but I did not fall in love... I liked how it was structured, I liked the evocation of landscape and season, but the characters were shadowy for me and it never reached the point of intensity that I wanted it to...that was perhaps the point: not to, to have many small flickers of light instead of one really bright & intense one, but it's what I wanted. I wanted less shadowy characters--for at least one of them not to be*--I wanted to believe in the narrator more than I did. I don't know finally how much was due to translation, how much difference a better translation would have made: maybe 4 stars (for this reader) instead of 3 or the 3.5 I'd give it. It was a very literary novel finally. I wanted it to be a bit more visceral. (I realize: the narrator is 67, he's looking back on his life...it's a meditative novel...but still).*interestingly, it occurs to me: there is one very intense character: Jon, and he's fascinating, but he disappears very early on.halfway through:Have been trying to figure out what's been bothering me about this book. On the one hand I like it, I love the story...on the other hand, something about the tone irks me. It's occurred to me that my reaction to the novel could be in large part because of its translation. This is a translator who rarely (except in dialogue) uses contractions. So, almost all of the first-person narration is written without contractions even though that isn't how most of us speak or think. It's incredibly stilted and feels mock-solemn.Example (granted, the passage I chose is a solemn one):But that is not what Lars means. Maybe he has seen one of those pictures, it is entirely possible, but that is not what he means. He has recognised me, as I have recognised him. It is more than fifty years ago, we were just children then, he was ten and I still fifteen and still frightened of everything that went on around me, which I did not understand even though I knew I was close enough to reach out my hand as far as I could, and then maybe reach the whole way and know the whole meaning of it all....Now more than fifty years later he sits directly opposite me at the table and knows who I am, and I have nothing to say to that. It is not an accusation, though it rather feels like one, nor is it a question, so I do not need to answer. But if I do not say anything it will all get terribly silent and difficult. (95).Here's how I might write it:But that is not what Lars means. Maybe he's seen one of those pictures, it's entirely possible, but that isn't what he means. He has recognised me, as I have recognised him. It was more than fifty years ago, we were just children then, he was ten and I still fifteen...I am wondering about the original: what's the tone like in Norwegian? Is it also so stilted, overly formal?(Manny? help me out here?)
Do You like book Out Stealing Horses (2007)?
Sumptuous Prose, but Largely Redundant Picking up this novel (translated from its original Norwegian), it is easy to understand why “Out Stealing Horses” has earned such high praise from critics; its author, Per Petterson, is a writer of astonishing talent. There are moments where his astute observations and beautiful descriptions sent chills down my spine. Petterson’s depth of understanding for his main character, Trond, is palpable, and he is carefully rendered in an achingly believable portrait of an aging, grieving man. The novel’s setting gets an equally loving respect from Petterson, whose description of Norway’s trees, rivers, and skies should do wonders for the country’s tourism (“I shut my eyes into a squint and looked across the water flowing past below the window, shining and glittering like a thousand stars, like the Milky Way could sometimes do in the autumn rushing foamingly on and winding through the night in an endless stream”). I would compare Petterson’s writing to the heart aching beauty of Pulitzer Prize winner Marilynne Robinson’s prose (her novel “Housekeeping” is every bit as poetic and haunting as this one). The problem I have with this otherwise stellar book is that I feel like I’ve read it before – many times at that.“Out Stealing Horses” finds Trond Sander living in a self-inflicted isolation as he heads into his twilight years. He has given up his former life for a solitary existence partially out of a life-long yearning to be left alone, but mostly out of grief for the sudden death of his beloved wife three years earlier. But when he realizes that his neighbor is a figure from his past it triggers a host of feelings and memories that Trond has been trying to avoid for a long time, and in flashbacks we are taken back with him to the summer of his fifteenth year – a summer that forever altered the course of his life, where friendly games of stealing horses gave way to tragedy and coming of age. Petterson acquits himself well enough in the unspooling of the narrative, but anyone who has ever read a Booker Prize winning novel will find the premise a little too familiar (“The God of Small Things,” “The Sea,” and “The Gathering,” to name only a few, all have a similar premise with the main character reflecting on their tragic past). But the real shame of it is that “Out Stealing Horses” peters out in the climax, leaving it without the oomph that might have distinguished it from those novels. And what we are left with is a painfully standard story told with stunningly beautiful writing. I wanted to like the novel more than I did because of Petterson’s talent as a writer, but the truth is that I just couldn’t shake the boredom in the end. Which is quite a shame, because Petterson has a lot more to offer.Grade: C+
—Gregory Baird
We have had a death in the family which has meant stopping almost everything to pay my respects to Death and Time. I don't know how long they'll be right in the house like this. Maybe until the Peak Freans run out, or until some illuminating memory shakes out of the vault to make sense of the whole; a snow globe marked 'Souvenir of Life on Earth', the light hidden in those falling fake metallic flakes. I do know that whatever it is, Death and TIme will return to their place on the back burner to be taken for granted again like breath itself. So what do you read when the geese are flying over, the leaves are turning, and Time is cleaning your mirrors? I happened to be reading 'the Norwegian book about the father and son'. And I couldn't have been reading a more perfect book for this time. Perhaps that's the recommendation right there; that this book could stand up to this time. It did not become too frivolous so that I had to set it aside, nor was it too complicated or difficult. It had no trickery and very little ego. The truths in this book are stated as sparely and simply as one of Sibelius' piano works, each piece of time whole in itself and then set down in just the right spot until it makes sense to the adult son and the reader. What the son finds out is that there is more than one order for time. There is the order in which it was lived, the order it is remembered (which is often on shuffle), and the special order that is like a puzzle. Work it, and it gives you the big picture, or at least the forest for the trees. Like the characters, the woods have a strong, resinous presence in this book."...and the wet boggy moss and the sweet, sharp, all-pervading odour of something greater than ourselves and beyond our comprehension; of the forest, which just went on and on to the north and into Sweden and over to Finland and further on the whole way to Siberia, and you could get lost in this forest and a hundred people go searching for weeks without a chance of finding you, and why should that be so bad, I wondered, to get lost here? But I did not know then how serious that thought was." I know those woods. They go to the tree-line and as spare as this book is, he leaves nothing out. There is some logging in this book, Stihl portraits that never get overwrought or silly. He really leaves nothing out.My high opinion of this book may be due to the time I read it, but I don't think so.
—Donna
This slender yet powerful book is one to read and reread. Following the death of his second wife when he "lost interest in talking to people," the aging narrator, Trond, has retired to a remote forest-village in Norway. When his nearest neighbor turns out to be a figure from his past, from a summer spent with his father which shaped the rest of his life, Trond’s memories begin to churn, despite attempts to lose himself in the details of surviving in his new environment (wood-chopping, shopping, cooking, dog-walking). He is forced to sort through a series of traumatic war-time events, both personal and political, that led to his father abandoning the family – and find a way to prevent himself repeating that pattern. The book is a sort of "unending conversation" in Trond’s mind, as he looks back on past losses and reflects on his coming old age.One of the best things about Out Stealing Horses is the narrator’s unassuming voice, which belies the force and intensity of the memories conjured up. It’s the calm, deliberate voice of someone I’d like to know better. Another notable aspect of this fairly amazing book is what one reviewer referred to as “the consolations of landscape.” The quiet setting (snowy forest, river, lake, remote village) is a profound presence in this novel, yielding the tranquility that allows Trond to remember and understand – you feel it yourself as you read the author’s lovely descriptions.Also impressive is the author’s ability to pass back and forth in time with undisturbed continuity. Adding to that, he draws parallels both subtle and obvious between past and present, which helps keep the narrative tightly bound.Finally, this book is filled with wonderful sentences – sentences that do the work of many. There is a purity to his prose, and I found myself reading certain passages over and over as I came across them and flipping back to find them again later. Here’s a sample from the first chapter:"Time is important to me now, I tell myself. Not that it should pass quickly or slowly, but be only time, be something I live inside and fill with physical things and activities that I can divide it up by, so that it grows distinct to me and does not vanish when I am not looking."I was sorry to turn the last page of Out Stealing Horses, and I know I will return to this lovely, impactful book. It is easy for me to recommend this one, especially to those who know what it means to seek solitude – the overwhelming beauty of being in a place "where there is only silence" and the risk of allowing time to "merely pass as you let others do the moving."
—Lisa
