Out Stealing Horses

Trond Sander, at 67 years old, is a simple man living alone with his dog, Lyra, deep in the Norwegian woods. He likes the quiet. He loves the solitude. It's as if he has run away from memories. In reality, he has done just that. Trond lost his sister and wife in one month three years prior. That was when he stopped talking to people. His silence is profound until he meets a stranger in the woods near his cabin. Only this stranger carries the very memories Trond has been trying to escape. Lars is a member of a family with entangled deep tragedies and Trond knows them well. Petterson is able to move Trond from past to present with remarkable grace. Trond as a teenager versus Trond, the aging adult in Norway's breathtaking landscape. Like show more any good drama, there is violence, illicit love, abandonment, and atonement with surprises along the way. I hope the movie is as spectacular as the book. show less

"I'll have to go down there," I shouted. And before my father could say anything, I had jumped in and let myself skink until I stood on the riverbed. There I felt the current punch me in the back and pull at my arms, and I opened my eyes and saw the end of the trunk straight in front of me, got the loop over my head and fastened it where I wanted it to be. It all went so well I felt I could stand there a long time almost weightless and just hold my breath an keep hands around that log."

I was thinking about my instinctive, irrational, and immediate rating of four stars for Out Stealing Horses, which is immaculately written, at times moving, and has a pedigree of many international literary awards to make its case. I was thinking about a show more feminist reading of this novel, which is set primarily in the masculine world of postwar rural Norway, and depicts the male bonding over work (mainly cutting and hauling timber). There is a subtle but unmistakable hostility towards women; the main female character is the mother of the narrator's friend, who collaborates in the anti-Nazi underground and enters the male world of work, only to be seen as a potential competitor for the father's affections. There are other clues of misogyny: the narrator's neglect of his grown daughter, moving back to the countryside without leaving so much as a phone number, the harsh tone he uses with his mother on a trip to a small town in Sweden, the fact that his ex-wives are barely alluded to or even named.

The disappearance of Trond's father and the implied entry into the urban, female world of Oslo (as symbolized by the suit his mother buys for him at the end of the novel), is the precursor to the older Trond returning to the setting of his childhood memories with his father. There is a stereotype (heard on the old Prairie Home Companion show) of the Norwegian bachelor farmer on the plains of Minnesota and the Dakotas. Trond the elder is the pure distillation of this: a man who goes off to the country to die alone, away from the complications of society. show less

Sixty seven year old Trond has purchased an isolated, spare cabin in the Norwegian woods, planning to live the remainder of his life in solitude with his rescued dog, Lyra. As Trond fixes up his cabin and gets ready for the oncoming winter, his mind drifts back to the summer of his fifteenth year when he and his father, who he hasn’t seen in 50 years, were in a similar cabin for the summer. His closest neighbor is Lars who, he realizes soon after meeting, he knew during that summer.

This particular summer is pivotal for Trond, as he sees his father, his hero, as both a man of extreme stature as well as a man somewhat diminished. It is a summer filled with joys. It is around this time that he feels he has a singular bond with his show more father, one that his sister who remained at home for the summer in Oslo with their mother, cannot replicate. It is during this summer that he gets a glimpse of his father’s war-time Resistance activities as told to him by a neighbor, something his father would never talk about.

There is also tragedy during the summer as a young boy, his friend Jon’s younger brother, is accidently killed in a rifle accident and Trond sees his father with another woman. That summer is the last time Trond would see his father. He never came home.

The spectacular thing about Out Stealing Horses is its subtlety. Readers can visualize Trond in his winter wonderland, trudging through the snow with Lyra or cutting up a fallen birch tree with Lars. They can visualize fifteen year old Trond working with his father felling trees on his property, looking longingly at Jon’s mother as she brings food to the logging men. You can picture the river curving around the bend, flowing from Norway to Sweden back into Norway. All of this is done without blatant similes. It is done with wordsmithing and language and slow but steady writing that draws readers in. The book is also spectacular for what it doesn’t say–about Trond’s father, about Trond’s cabin, about Lars. There are hints, but the reader must ultimately decide for himself.

Out Stealing Horses (the title does have a meaning in the story, but I won’t tell you) won the 2007 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award as well as several other awards. Susan, who reads much more literary works than I do, suggested this book at the Brooklyn Book Festival and I’m glad because it is not “my genre” but it is so worth reading. show less

The intriguing title of this book actually refers to two separate and completely different meanings, connected only by the characters; and, of course, no one is really "stealing horses." It's just part of the charm of this very satisfying little gem, set in Norway, alternately, today and shortly after WWII, with reference to a time when the Germans occupied the little town close to the Swedish border, three years prior.

Trond Sander is the 60ish protragonist, telling the story alternately from his youth. He is an excellent storyteller and grabs you on the first page and doesn't let go as he tells of living in a small cottage with his father during the summer of 1948 and how that summer affected the rest of his life. A tragedy takes place show more that summer and, coincidentally, the main character in that drama shows up 45 years later, in another location, living next door to Trond. With his boyhood aquaintance living nearby, Trond comes to terms with his life, how he dealt with the indiscretions and secrecy of his father and, in turn, his own daughter. In his own words "we do decide for ourselves when it will hurt." Elegant language and an excellent read. show less

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 show more 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. show less

In his sixty-seventh year, Trond Sander purchases a house in the Norwegian countryside and seeks the solitude and silence for which he longs.

Trond’s only company is a dog named Lyra and an older man who lives in a cabin near the river not too far from Trond’s home. There in the desolate and beautiful wilderness and as he gets to know his neighbor, Trond begins to remember the summer of 1948 when he was fifteen years old and on the cusp of becoming a man. It is these memories which drive the novel forward - a slow unraveling of one fateful summer where everything changed. As Trond reveals the multiple layers of his past, he comes to grips with his present and begins to gain an understanding of the man he has become.

Out Stealing show more Horses is in part about a boy’s relationship with his father which is both touching and compelling. Trond’s father is a complex man with a mysterious past - a man who worked for the Norwegian underground during the Nazi occupation, and who has formed connections which the young Trond is just beginning to understand.

Petterson seamlessly moves between the past and present, gradually revealing each character and putting together the pieces of Trond’s life. This is a novel rich with emotion, one that explores pain, betrayal, identity, and loss. The language of the novel is evocative, simple and luminous.

I was mesmerized by this book. Seemingly a simple tale, it later reveals itself to be a complex study of grief and loss. This is not a book to be read quickly, but one which should be savored.

Highly recommended. show less

It was a slow, satisfying read; a story without much plot but with a lot of depth. A man who has recently lost his wife takes himself to a relatively remote farm in Norway similar to the one where he spent summers as a boy, determined to live alone and be as independent as possible for the time left to him. As he prepares for his first winter his mind takes him back to scenes from his childhood, and we learn very gradually about the days he spent with his father in the woods, the life lessons, both intended and not so, that he learned back then. It's a very Scandinavian sort of story, with cold and loneliness almost palpable, and the theme of abandonment threads through both past and present. There is loss, but there is also acceptance. show more It could have been depressing, but it struck me as simply realistic. Recommended. show less