Out Stealing Horses: A Novel | Per Petterson

Out Stealing Horses: A Novel | Per Petterson | Out Stealing Horses

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Out Stealing Horse...

	Out Stealing Horses: A Novel Per Petterson Picador, 2008 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 79 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
A TIME MAGAZINE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
WINNER OF THE IMPAC DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD

Out Stealing Horses has been embraced across the world as a classic, a novel of universal relevance and power. Panoramic and gripping, it tells the story of Trond Sander, a sixty-seven-year-old man who has moved from the city to a remote, riverside cabin, only to have all the turbulence, grief, and overwhelming beauty of his youth come back to him one night while he's out on a walk. From the moment Trond sees a strange figure coming out of the dark behind his home, the reader is immersed in a decades-deep story of searching and loss, and in the precise, irresistible prose of a newly crowned master of fiction.

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A Quiet Treasure

One of the main events in Per Petterson's novel, "Out Stealing Horses" is the felling, creating of and then float of logs down a river. The further I moved through this book, the more I felt that the flow of the author's words resembled the pattern of those logs.

At times there seems a log jam as Patterson's words are the bare minimum needed to move the story forward. Surroundings, actions, emotions are described, but in a trickle of words. Then the flow picks up and color enters the picture as his elegantly sparse prose fills in a bit. And then the force of bottled up thoughts, emotions, happenings rush at the reader with a fury; sentences become paragraphs, paragraphs become pages, and in the most glorious way, the reader fears drowning under the weight of the words.

The story seems a simple one. An older man, Trond Sander, moves to a small cabin in Norway to be alone, to revisit the place that was a defining moment of his youth, to think.

Trond is a man, were he real, and were I to meet him, who would greet me pleasantly, offer me a chair, and then minutes could pass with not a word. He seems to embody the very definition of companionable silence. (Or probably, in his case, uncomfortable silence due to his strong desire to be left alone.) And yet, his thoughts and memories are so beautifully drawn that one can understand why he is happy to be left alone with them.

"I can still feel the same thing today when I see a hayrack in a photograph from a book, but all that is a thing of the past now. No-one makes hay this way any more in this part of the country; today there is one man alone on a tractor, and then the drying on the ground and the mechanical turner and wrapping machines and huge plastic white cubes of stinking silage. So the feeling of pleasure slips into the feeling that time has passed, that it is very long ago, and the sudden feeling of being old."

Several times Petterson lured me into a descriptive passage and then startled me with the finish. "When I sit here now, in the kitchen of the old house I have planned to make into a livable place in the years left to me, and my daughter has gone after a surprising visit and taken with her her voice and her cigarettes and the orange lights from her car down the road, and I look back to that time I see how each movement through the landscape took color from what came afterward and cannot be separated from it."

At times there is a possibly sarcastic (?) element to Trond's descriptions of events in his life, where he looks back at his younger self with eyes jaded with time.

"I pressed my nose against the glass and gazed into the cloud of dust slowly rising outside and hiding my father in a whirl of grey and brown, and I did everything you are supposed to do in a situation like that, in such a scene; I rose quickly and ran down the gangway between the seats to the last row and jumped up on it knees first and placed my hands on the window and stared up the road until the shop and the oak tree and my father had vanished round a bend, and all this is as if I had been thoroughly rehearsed in the film we have seen so often, where the fateful farewell is the crucial event and the lives of the protagonists are changed forever and take off in directions that are unexpected and not always nice, and the whole cinema audience knows just how it will turn out."

This is balanced at times with quiet reverence for the experiences he has now. "Everything that was me lay taut and quivering just beneath my skin."

This book, a reflection of a life lived although not completely understood, has flashes of pure luminosity.

"And it dawned on me that from that small patch of cobble stones I stood on there were lines going out in several directions, as in a precisely drawn diagram, with me standing in a circle in the middle, and today, more than fifty years later, I can close my eyes and clearly see those lines, like shining arrows, and if I did not see them quite as clearly that autumn day in Karlstad, I did know they were there, of that I am certain. And those lines were the different roads I could take, and having chosen one of them, the portcullis would come crashing down, and someone hoist the drawbridge up, and a chain reaction would be set in motion..."

Trond, and certainly not the reader, will ever get a complete account of what has happened in his life. And yet, there is enough. Enough joy, and pain, and beauty and despair...enough time, that when the story for the reader, and probably life for Trond, comes to an end, one does not feel shortchanged.

"If you were dead, you were dead, but in the fraction of a second just before; whether you realized then it was the end, and what that felt like. There was a narrow opening there, like a door barely ajar, that I pushed towards, because I wanted to get in, and there was a golden light in that crack that came from the sunlight on my eyelids , and then suddenly I slipped inside, and I was certain there for a little flash, and it did not frighten me at all, just made me sad and astonished at how quiet everything was."

And the last line of this book, which I am desperate to include in this review but will not, this last line almost literally took my breath away with its force. After this last line, I set this book down carefully and with awe, and the story settled into place like that final log in the drift. And the river flows on.

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Out Stealing Horses

I'm not a huge fan of fiction--it generally disappoints so I stick to non-fiction. But this one caught my eye--largely because it was written by a Norwegian and had gotten a good review. It was wonderfully translated. A real gem. And clean enough so that you could share it with an older relative and not be embarrassed. Great story!

Personal Search/Reflection on a life

This is a brief but large beautifully written book. A grieving man retreats to the solitude of his youth-the woods of Norway-the place of his father, the place where he grows from adolescence to young adulthood. Don't expect the loose ends to be tied. The author leaves questions. A great book club selection.

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A most extraordinary voice

First, I read In The Wake, then Out Stealing Horses. Both books affected me in the same way; I was mesmerized. This is a writer who controls his reader from the start. He draws you in while you drum your fingers impatiently -- what a slow book, you are thinking -- then he owns you.

After finishing In The Wake, my first thought was...eat your heart out, Ernest Hemingway. This author is more knowing, more skilled, larger, unmannered. (Perhaps appearing unmannered is his skill?) I didn't want to read another author for a week or two; they all read like amateurs.

I am reading Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist. She has much of the same hypnotic power and control over the reader.

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Good Read

This book loses something in the translation. It starts out a little slow. Although this is a good story, it is not written as well as I would have preferred.

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

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