tomcarrico

Out Stealing Horses

By Per Petterson (translated by Anne Born)

Reviewed by Tom Carrico

“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.”  - From Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson

I really hadn’t intended to review this book, but a month or so after finishing it, sections still come back into my mind and make me think.  It is rare for me that a novel remains that memorable.  Out Stealing Horses is one of those unpretentious little novels that don’t seem particularly wonderful when reading it but in retrospect packs quite a punch.  The characters here are not all that heroic or noteworthy.  The dialogue is sparse.  The setting for me was unique and made the book interesting (I don’t believe that I have ever read a book set in Norway).  A lot of the small stories within the bigger story are really quite mundane: daily chores, shopping trips, and superficial conversations for example.  The totality of the book, however, is far greater than the sum of its parts.

Per Petterson lives in Oslo, Norway.  He is a former librarian and has published four previous novels.  This particular novel garnered much attention in Europe and won the Dublin Literary Award, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Norwegian Booksellers’ Prize.  Reviewers in the United States raved about it as well.  Thomas McGuane, writing in the “New York Review of Books” said that this novel is “superb...a gripping account of such originality as to expand the reader’s own experience of life.”

First and foremost, this is a story of an older man looking back on his life and trying to discover meaning and rational explanations for the events, both good and bad, that have happened to him.  Trond Sander is a sixty-seven year old widower who has abandoned his city life and moved to a dilapidated cabin in the woods.  In the opening of the book we are told of Trond’s gradual acclimation to his new home, his planned improvements to the cabin and his daily walks to a nearby lake with his dog Lyra.  This sets a lyrical pace for the rest of the book and helps the reader gain some early perspective of Trond’s view of life.  The pace and retrospective nature of the story allows for philosophical musings such as the one at the heading of this review.

Trond eventually meets a few neighbors, one of whom is a childhood friend.  Through these interactions we learn of Trond’s youth, including a summer which he spent with his father at a similar lake.  Norway was occupied by the Nazis at the time and Trond’s father was absent for long periods.  It took a while for Trond to realize that his father was working against the Nazis in an underground resistance movement, running documents and an occasional fugitive into nearby Sweden.  Post-war, Trond’s father abandons his family, a fact that Trond struggles to understand.

This book is primarily about choices:  choices we all make in life which can pivot life’s trajectory in completely different directions.  At one point while Trond is with his father for the summer, his father tells him to clear an area from around the house which is overgrown with weeds.  Trond stops when he realizes that there are thorns on all of the plants.  His father realized he hadn’t done what he asked:

“’Why not cut down the nettles?’ he 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 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 he did not stop before he had pulled them all up.  Nothing in his face indicated that it hurt, and I felt a bit ashamed as I walked along the path....”

Later in the book, Trond relates a story from his teen years.  He was traveling in Sweden with his mother after his father had left.  He was frustrated by the language barrier and became angry with a total stranger because the stranger could not understand that Trond needed directions.  He became angered to the point of violence and balled his fist to strike the man:

“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 that 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 which no-one could stop, and there would be no running back, no retracing my steps.  And if I hit the man standing in front of me I would have made that choice.”

This is a story also about fate and random chance and how each can affect a person’s life.  An untended hunting rifle leads to the tragic death of a toddler; a few scattered footprints in the snow reveal movements of the resistance to Nazi guards; a slight change in river currents costs Trond’s family significant income from lost timber.  Those intersecting lines of choice are detoured by the hands of fate and chance.  For Trond, it all comes down to what one can control and what one can’t. 

If you are looking for a thrill-a-minute page turner, this is not your book.  If you are looking for an inspired, thoughtful as well as thought provoking, almost poetic story Out Stealing Horses is for you.  Read it and savor it.  I don’t think you will be disappointed.