I found the writing excellent and the story very interesting, but somewhat difficult to follow-- I think that was intentional by the author. I liked the characters and the setting. ( )

This book was given to me by my nephew. It probably isn't a book that I would normally pick to read, but I am glad I did. The authors style of writing was very descriptive and each scene that was described was easy to imagine. However it was difficult to follow along at times when the author would jump back and forth from the present time and the past. Sometimes I was unsure which time period the character was in. I wish the ending would have been more "tidied up" and resolved some relationship issues as there was a lot left unsaid. But, the story was intriguing and left me wanting to keep reading.

My favorite passage was this..." I want to use the time it takes. 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 highly recommend this book, if, like me, you like your space and solitude and can relate to someone seeking actively seeking it.

The main character, Trond, is in his 60's, reliving his teenage experiences with his Dad. So it hops back and forth in time, seamlessly, and shows this incredible bond between father and son. The bond is so strong that events that come along are not easily understood at first. They don't always fit in with the first perception of the close familial bond.

The location, Norway, is fascinating: Petterson spends much time discussing the geography, botany, and farm activities of Norway. The weather, with the short days and long nights then is shifted to long days with short nights, and this seasonal shift seems to be reflected in the character's choices.

I don't want to say much else, as to ruin it for someone else, but do curl up with this on a quiet afternoon, with a pot of hot coffee. Have your dog at your feet and a blanket to curl up with, as inevitably you'll soon feel chilly.

One thing that astounded me again, in reading this, has been my noticing of late that many books involving older people seem to have all of them reliving their childhood moments, specifically their teen years. I don't know why I hadn't noticed that before. Maybe it wasn't my time to notice those things. It made me wonder, does my dad, at roughly the same age, think about his father in most waking moments? I think I should ask. Because in my life it seems I'm so occupied with just the here and now, I don't have time to look back, and can't really think of a single teenage experience significant enough to ponder in the future. ( )

The story is a good one - but it is the writing that makes this a spectacular book. The prose is smooth and simple, but very evocative. I knew I was in a Scandinavian country - many of the books I've read by Scandinavian authors have a similar style. The reader feels the extremes of weather and of solitude. The characters are clearly drawn. You know who they are in just a few well chosen words. This is just a beautiful book. ( )

http://tinyurl.com/yge83s6

I love any novel set in Scandinavia. It's not the fact that it makes me feel cold to read it (as a friend recently put it), but that the language is always spare and to the point. I honestly don't think there's a Norwegian Hemingway-- I think all Norwegian writers channel him.

While I appreciated the style of the writing, it was ultimately confusing in places. There are two to three different timelines, depending on how you look at it, and Petterson does weave them together adroitly for the most part, but at times you are not quite sure if the current character is the boy or the man. This could very well be one of Petterson's points, but it makes it a little difficult to follow.

There's a lot going on here-- the mystery of one's own father, the danger of war, planned and unplanned isolation from a community. I can't easily reconcile the early interactions between the boy and his friend Jon with the later interactions of the man and Jon's brother, Lars. Is this meant to describe the reticence of Norwegian culture? Because there's not much going on on the surface, and it's a mystery to some degree what is happening in these people's brains.

In the long run, I like these kinds of novels for the sense of peace that they give me, even while they're sotto voce discussing things best left unearthed. ( )

DICKENS IN NORWAY

While this is a “coming of age” novel, it is not just that. It is also a novel of Trond “coming to grips” with his own character and his place in the world. The respective progressions of his coming of age and coming to grips are told in not-quite parallel vignettes of the past and the present.
It is significant that his present begins in the autumn. It is as if he is finishing what was begun in that important summer of 1948, when he was fifteen. Although he has not gone back to the precise location where he had spent that summer with his father, it is a strikingly similar place. Both locations are close to the Swedish border. Both are small cabins outside small towns. The point is brought home by the ambiguous sentence Trond uses to remark the coincidence of his being Lars’s neighbor: “What I have wondered is how we can end up in the same place after all these years.” (p. 155, emphasis in original). Of course it is not merely coincidence:

That kind of coincidence seems far-fetched in fiction, in modern novels anyway, and I find it hard to accept. It may be all very well in Dickens, but when you read Dickens you’re reading a long ballad from a vanished world, where everything has to come together in the end like an equation, where the balance of what was once disturbed must be restored so that the gods can smile again.

(p. 60).
Despite Trond’s protestations, this novel is Dickensian in its balancing and coincidences. For example, he awakens late and has trouble getting out of bed (pp. 168-69) the morning he goes with his father and Franz when they chopped the lumber stays down in order to have the timber fall into the river. Trond wishes, “I had a friend like Franz I could swing my axe with and make plans and use my strength with and laugh and cut logs with by a river…” (p. 173). More than fifty years later, he again awakens late, has trouble getting out of bed (p.119), and spends the day happily working with Lars to remove the tree that had been uprooted by the storm the night before. He got his wish. But the later incident is more than just an echo of the earlier one. The earlier incident ends with Trond’s oedipal challenge to his father’s relationship with Jon’s (and Lars’s) mother by squeezing between them where they sit together on a log (!). In the second incident, he is able to come to terms with his father by becoming friendly with Lars. It needs to be recalled that Trond had learned many physical tasks from his father simply by imitating him:

I close my eyes every time I have to do something practical apart from the daily chores everyone has, and then I picture how my father would have done it or how he actually did do it while I was watching him, and then I copy that until I fall into the proper rhythm, and the task reveals itself….And the person observing is me, and the man I am watching, his movements and skills, is a man of barely forty, as my father was when I saw him for the last time when I was fifteen, and he vanished from my life forever. To me he will be never be older.

(pp.69-70, emphasis in original). The one thing he did not learn from his father was how to use a chainsaw; “The one-man saws had not reached the Norwegian forests in 1948.” (p.72). Thus, it is Lars who discharges the role of his father:

I like watching Lars work. I would not call him brisk, but he is systematic and moves more elegantly up to the birch trunk with the heavy saw in his grasp than he does out on the road with Poker. His style infects my style, and that is how it usually is for me; the movement first and then the comprehension…

(p.141, emphasis mine). The Dickensian complexity is shown when we add to the notion that Lars is filling the place of Trond’s father, Trond’s own notion that Lars substituted for Trond as a son to Trond’s father:

‘Did you take the place that was rightfully mine? Did you have years out of my life that I should have lived?’

(p. 198). There are more reverberations. Lars had years of life that his twin, Odd, should have lived. Jon took over the farm when Lars was only twenty years old, and had years of life with their mother that Lars should have had. Trond’s father moved in with Jon’s mother, and had years of life Jon’s father should have had. Then again, it was Trond that caused Jon’s father and Trond’s father were clearly competing for the attention of Jon’s mother when stacking logs (!), it was Trond puting his arm around Jon’s mother that distracted Jon’s father so that he fell and was hurt. He went to the hospital, and never returned to his family. It was a Dickensian balance that Trond would have to replace Lars’s father with his own, only to have an echo of his father back in the person of Lars.
1948 was the year of Trond’s passage from childhood to manhood. He becomes aware of his sexuality and the feeling of power it gives him. It is Jon who first shows him his own power:

What he had taught me was to be reckless, taught me that if I let myself go, did not slow myself down by thinking so much beforehand I could achieve many things I would never have dreamt possible.

(p. 18). That Trond is not yet mature enough to handle his own new-found power is shown metaphorically when he lands wrong on the horse, hurting his crotch, and is thrown from the horse. It is not until Trond is subject to the feminine and civilizing influence of his mother that he truly matures. He symbolically crosses the border into manhood when he crosses into Sweden with his mother. His maturity is shown when he controls his irrational temper with the man who does not understand his request for directions, and his mother buys him his first suit. The success of this crossing into Sweden is in sharp contrast to the time he had previously gone with his father on the three day trip. Trond had been so excited to cross over to Sweden that he lost control of his horse and was thrown to the ground.
Similarly, it is not until Trond’s daughter comes to visit him and he learns that they had both had similar thoughts about David Copperfield. He realizes that, like his own father, he had abandoned his child, and was not there when she had needed to talk to him. After her visit he is finally able to integrate his past and his present and to see himself clearly:

I look out at the yard, but there is nothing but my own reflection in the dark glass.

(p.201). Thus, like David Copperfield, he is the leading character of his own life, and everything falls “into its rightful place in the end.” (p. 198). Seeing his reflection—his twin--demonstrates that he has found that necessary part of himself that remained missing from so many other characters and lives in the novel.

this book is about so much that i don't know where to begin. the relationships between fathers and sons, friendship, old age, death, life.... just read it, its really good! ( )

This was a book club selection. While I didn't love this book and often found it confusing as it jumps back and forth in time, our book club definitely had a very lengthy discussion about it and I came to appreciate it much more. It is the story of a teenage boy who is slowly learning about his father and his roll as a smuggler during the war. ( )

Mildly interesting, but a little slow. The prose style fit the setting of the story nicely: spare but beautiful. ( )

Out Stealing Horses (2003) is a "quiet novel" in multiple senses: there is little character dialog, it is literally quiet; the setting takes place in the quiet rural Norwegian countryside; and, quiet in the sense some parts of the novel are simply left unsaid, it is up to the intelligent and insightful reader to piece together meaning. For instance, to find meaning in the phrase "Out Stealing Horses" beyond the literal action of horse theft, or the WWII password. These "types" of quietude come together in this work of art which fits nicely with the common perception of Norwegian character, giving it an aesthetic wholeness which is pleasing.

One of the themes of the novel is free will versus fate. The main character, Trond, believes his life is determined by his own actions and choices. Yet ironically he is a lifelong fan of Charles Dickens, the very epitome of a fateful view of the universe - the good guys always come out on top and the bad guys get their due in the end - it's fated! Dickens is mentioned numerous times including the Bildungsroman David Copperfield, an implied favorite of Tronds. A question is, how does Trond reconcile his own view of his life, versus his love of Dickens (free will versus fate); how do we as readers reconcile Pettersons novel, which is modern in approach (characters have free will), with Tronds recounted life, which seems to be fated by the pattern of life-events inherited from his father? I believe Trond does what we all do: operate according to free will while moving forward in time, but when looking backward, we search for meaning, for stories, to explain what happened, to find fate - ironically the very thing Petterson demands of his readers. Fate and free will is one of the great questions, and it is a great piece of modern literature that can play with it so.. quietly.

--Review by Stephen Balbach, via CoolReading (c) 2008 cc-by-nd ( )

A quiet, contemplative novel, this has received accolades and raves in abundance from the literary world. As I am always contrary, the short of is that I liked it but wasn't wowed by it like everyone else. Perhaps it is simply yet another victim of excessive expectations up to which it couldn't possibly live.

Trond, a 67 year old man, has chosen to buy a house in a remote part of Norway, and to mostly seal himself off from the rest of the world in spare solitude. But a chance encounter one night with his nearest neighbor, sends him tumbling back in memory to the pivotal summer of his adolescence. His neighbor is the younger brother of Trond's friend, the one with whom he adventured and imagined and played the summer he lived with his father at another remote summer cabin home before tragedy played itself out in both boys' lives.

Told with heedlessness to a linear timeline, the novel slides forwards and backwards from the present to the distant past and back again, from Trond's current, slow labor around his cabin to his childhood to his father's past. Petterson has a quiet way of revealing the story behind that pivotal summer and the main players in the book. This subtleness is a real strength of the novel. Trond, drawn as the slightly curmudgeonly would-be hermit, is a very different literary character than I usually encounter in my reading and he comes across as entirely authentic. He is gruff and short and yet curious and glimmers of the imaginative boy of his youth still shine through.

Other characters are really incidental in the story as it is Trond and his memories and understandings of the course of his life and his father's which matter most in the narrative. But other characters are introduced and are left as merely sketches from Trond's memory. Even his daughter, who comes to visit him one day, is a flat character, one whom the reader may be surprised to encounter, given her brief exlanationless flash through the pages.

While I recognize that this was a beautifully crafted novel, it still wasn't one that called to me to immerse myself in it constantly. I needed breaks from the simple, intense, and yet oddly slow moving revelations found within its pages. Just as Trond held himself aloof from others, uneasy but wanting to be content with his solitude, I found myself staying aloof from the story but wanting to be drawn in. In looking back on the book as a whole, I find myself labelling it lovely and sleepy, somehow unfinished and quietly startling. An intriguing read, it didn't hold my interest as well as I'd hoped. ( )

Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson is a novel as book of memories. It is the story of a life pieced together from moments of action and surprise, meditation and love, and one of tragedy. Per Petterson's simple and often poetic prose makes the quotidian events of a life lived in rural Norway as interesting as the most extreme moments of an adventure novel. The adventure here is on a small scale with the outside world intervening at moments, but mostly with a focus on the solitary. Trond, who tells us his story says,
"To me it is better to stand alone, but for the moment the blue world gives a consolation I am not sure I want, and do not need, and still I take it." (p. 99)
We meet his family and friends and father and slowly share in the secrets of his life. Told from the perspective of a sixty-seven year old man at the end of the century, the narrative takes in moments from a life that has accumulated meaning and purpose from those very moments. This is a serious and thoughtful story. It is a book that stays with you long after you put it down not in little part due to its' resonance with the moments in your own life. ( )

Rec. by Correen Morrill. Note the way the stories are presented -- the way the author remembered them.

Some great passages:P. 67...and if this had been something in a novel it would have just been iritating. I hacein fact done a lot of reading particularly during the last few years, but earlIer too, by all means, and I have thought about what I've read, and that kind of coincidence seems far-fetched in fiction, in modern novels anyway, and I find it hard to accept. It may be all very well in Dickens, but when you read Dickens you're reading a long ballad from a vanished world, where everything has to come toget er in the end like an equation, where the balance of what was once disturbed must be restored so that the gods can smile again. A consolation, maybe, or a protest against a world gone off the rails, but it is nit like that anymore, my world is not like that, and I have never gone along with those who believe our lives are governed by fate. They whine, they wash their hands and crave pity. I believe we shape our lives ourselves, at any rate I have shaped mine, for what it's worth, and I take responsibility.P. 73People like it when you tell them things, in su table portions, in a modest, intimate tone, and they think they know you, but they do not, they know about you, for what they are let in on are the facts, not feelIngs, not what your ipinion is about anything at all, not how what ha happened to you and how all the decisions you have made have turned you into they are. What they do is they fill in with their own feelings and opinions and assumptions, and they compose a new life which ha precious little to do wit yours, and that let's you off the hook. No-one can touch you unless you yourself want them to. You inly have to be polite and smile and keep paranoid thoughts at bay, because they will talk about you no matter how much you squirm, it is inevitable, and you would do the same thing yourself. P.212"'Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.'"She smiles again and says: 'I always thought those opening lInes were a bit scary because they indicated we would not necessarily be the leading characters of our own lives. I couldn't imagine how that could come about, something so awful; a sort of ghost-life where I could do nothing but watch that person who had taken my place and maybe hate her deeply and envy he everything, but not Be able to do anything about it because at some point in time I had fallen out of my life as if from an aeroplane, I pictured it, and out into empty space, and there I drifted about and could not get back, and someone elsE was sitting fastened into my seat, although that place was mine, and I had the ticket in my hand." ( )

I love stories that slowly take shape from putting together many pieces of imperfect information from a first-person observer. (The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford is maybe the supreme example). I admire Petterson's prose...it missed four stars because I thought that it dropped off a bit toward the end in holding the tension and attention of the reader, but I would read more by him. ( )

I love stories that slowly take shape from putting together many pieces of imperfect information from a first-person observer. (The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford is maybe the supreme example). I admire Petterson's prose...it missed four stars because I thought that it dropped off a bit toward the end in holding the tension and attention of the reader, but I would read more by him. ( )

I love stories that slowly take shape from putting together many pieces of imperfect information from a first-person observer. (The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford is maybe the supreme example). I admire Petterson's prose...it missed four stars because I thought that it dropped off a bit toward the end in holding the tension and attention of the reader, but I would read more by him. ( )

A coming of age tale told by our protagonist, Trond Sander, and elderly Norwegian man who has gone to retire alone to a cabin in rural Norway. An encounter with his neighbor who turns out to be someone from his past causes him to reflect on the last summer he spent with his father. The events of this summer of his fifteenth year in 1948 are mysterious, eye-opening, beautiful, and horrifying for Trond and I guess ultimately make him the man he becomes. Although unfortunately, I found it difficult to get a handle on exactly what kind of man Trond is.

The writing is lyrical and at times quite poignant in a spare poetic way. It seems the story has great potential and I really loved the first half. However so many different subplots are dangled, yet not fully developed and it becomes a bit frustruating to discern truly what the central conflict really is. The entire third part felt to me like a waste of a scene and an ending as there was so much else I wanted to know -- especially about Trond's life between say the ages of 15 and 67. For instance, why bring his daughter into it at all without giving us any context?

Overall, enjoyable but I feel this work did not live up to what it could have been. Clearly a talented writer but this was a bit lost somewhere between a short story and a novel. I was a little disappointed after all the raves and the great beginning. ( )

Beautiful writing, unusual twist with the spy stuff and love affair. ( )

For a novel about a guy who moved to remote Norwegian woods, there's a lot of drama and folks dying. Nicely written though. A slow read that makes me with I was still in school to analyze ( )

A gorgeous novel that explores themes of innocence and abandonment. It ends all too quickly. ( )

Out Stealing Horses was very enjoyable read overall. I liked his writing style-- excellent and vivid descriptions of natural surroundings, and a well-paced narrative with good plot structure. It reminded me of Snow Falling on Cedars quite a bit. ( )

Although I really wanted to like this book, I ended up losing interest about half way and had a difficult time picking it up after that juncture. I did finish it though. But mainly, I found the characters very tedious and unlikeable. I enjoy spare prose and when the reader gets to fill in the blanks (and use some intelligence in the process), but frankly, I never cared much what happened to these people. It is a very male-centered book, with much posturing between the father and son; the father and his "friend" and the protagonist and his friend John, much of which made very little sense (but maybe that was the point?). There is a huge amount of space given to the manly world of timber felling and sales; and a good bit on "stealing horses" (riding other peoples' horses, basically, as they are not stolen). It seemed everyone went so far out of their way to avoid dealing with the reality of the situations and each other ~ to the point where it was rather goofy. Despite all, I found the writing quite beautiful in spots, the locale interesting and certainly unique for a U.S. reader. However, I cannot really think of a person I'd recommend this to. It is very slow and the characters dull and frustrating. ( )

Well-written, atmospheric, Hemingway-esque in both style and substance--manly men doing manly tasks in rather excessively detailed yet somehow mesmerizing prose. Trond as an old man has retreated to an isolated cabin, but his past is painfully close--literally, in the form of his only neighbor, Lars, who is the brother of his boyhood friend, Jon. Lars accidentally shot his twin brother with Jon's gun, and this tragedy marked the end of Jon and Trond's friendship, as Jon left home irretrievably damaged. The narrative moves back and forth between this time in the past--Trond's critical 15th year--and his isolated present. The father he idolizes turns out to have been part of the Resistance, and while leading this weird double life in which he spends much of his time living apart from his family in a remote village near the Swedish border has fallen in love with his cohort, Jon's mother. During the summer in question, he's decided to fell all the timber on his land and sell it and enlists Trond to help. The proceeds from the sale (which turn out to be about enough to buy one man's suit--for Trond) are intended to be left for his wife and family after he abandons them, for he never returns home after that summer. This pivotal abandonment shapes Trond's life and brings him to where he is in the present. ("Out stealing horses," incidentally, is a password, for moving information along the underground Resistance route.) ( )

I wish I could have read this book in its original language; there were times when the translations were not quite right, at least not for American English. (I'm not a writer and when I start thinking of what I think would be a better word, that's not good!) And afterwards, I thought, "Come on, Trond! Why didn't you go back to...?" or "You mean you really NEVER had any more contact with...?" That's OK because I was talking to Trond, not the author, but there was one key plot point that seemed sooo improbable to me that I got distracted thinking about how the author could have brought these two characters together in a different way, or whether he even needed to. This was a quiet book, but I'm a sucker for coming-of-age stories, so was deeply interested in finding out all that did happen that summer when Trond was fifteen that led to him to want to be so alone at 67. Overall, I'm not sure I would be all that satisfied with this book if the author had not written the perfect last half of a last sentence which so neatly summed up (and made me feel so much more empathy for) what the narrator was struggling with throughout this story.