Out Stealing Horses: A Novel [Paperback]

Per Petterson (Author), Anne Born (Translator)

Book Description

Release date: April 29, 2008

We were going out stealing horses. That was what he said, standing at the door to the cabin where I was spending the summer with my father. I was fifteen. It was 1948 and oneof the first days of July.

Trond's friend Jon often appeared at his doorstep with an adventure in mind for the two of them. But this morning was different. What began as a joy ride on "borrowed" horses ends with Jon falling into a strange trance of grief. Trond soon learns what befell Jon earlier that day--an incident that marks the beginning of a series of vital losses for both boys.

Set in the easternmost region of Norway, Out Stealing Horses begins with an ending. Sixty-seven-year-old Trond has settled into a rustic cabin in an isolated area to live the rest of his life with a quiet deliberation. A meeting with his only neighbor, however, forces him to reflect on that fateful summer.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Award-winning Norwegian novelist Petterson renders the meditations of Trond Sander, a man nearing 70, dwelling in self-imposed exile at the eastern edge of Norway in a primitive cabin. Trond's peaceful existence is interrupted by a meeting with his only neighbor, who seems familiar. The meeting pries loose a memory from a summer day in 1948 when Trond's friend Jon suggests they go out and steal horses. That distant summer is transformative for Trond as he reflects on the fragility of life while discovering secrets about his father's wartime activities. The past also looms in the present: Trond realizes that his neighbor, Lars, is Jon's younger brother, who "pulls aside the fifty years with a lightness that seems almost indecent." Trond becomes immersed in his memory, recalling that summer that shaped the course of his life while, in the present, Trond and Lars prepare for the winter, allowing Petterson to dabble in parallels both bold and subtle. Petterson coaxes out of Trond's reticent, deliberate narration a story as vast as the Norwegian tundra. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From The New Yorker

In this quiet but compelling novel, Trond Sander, a widower nearing seventy, moves to a bare house in remote eastern Norway, seeking the life of quiet contemplation that he has always longed for. A chance encounter with a neighbor—the brother, as it happens, of his childhood friend Jon—causes him to ruminate on the summer of 1948, the last he spent with his adored father, who abandoned the family soon afterward. Trond’s recollections center on a single afternoon, when he and Jon set out to take some horses from a nearby farm; what began as an exhilarating adventure ended abruptly and traumatically in an act of unexpected cruelty. Petterson’s spare and deliberate prose has astonishing force, and the narrative gains further power from the artful interplay of Trond’s childhood and adult perspectives. Loss is conveyed with all the intensity of a boy’s perception, but acquires new resonance in the brooding consciousness of the older man.
Copyright © 2007 Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 238 pages
• Publisher: Picador; 1st edition (April 29, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312427085
• ISBN-13: 978-0312427085
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (235 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #30,043 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

PER PETTERSON won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for the novel Out Stealing Horses, which has been translated into more than thirty languages and was named a Best Book of 2007 by The New York Times and Entertainment Weekly. Before publishing his first book, Petterson worked as a bookseller in Norway.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

174 of 179 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A calm and quiet place February 19, 2009

By Bryan Byrd

Format:Paperback

There are bound to be people annoyed and disappointed by 'Out Stealing Horses', as it is not the traditional narrative they may be used to. Instead of building toward a climactic finish, or revealing a fateful detail that ties together several unrelated events, 'Out Stealing Horses' is a dreamy recitation of memories and the present day, as experienced by an aging widower in rural Norway. The 'payoff', if it can be called that, is not a gratification of the reader's curiousity, but an impressionistic portrait of the sum total of a life.

Alternating between the summer of 1948 and the present, Per Petterson writes of Trond Sanders, who is essentially trying to disappear from the world after three years of mourning for his wife. He has moved to the country, and obsesses over tiny details of his new existence. At the same time, he examines the events from 60 years earier, when he spent a season with his father, a former member of the underground during the Nazi occupation.

It's surprising how big this story is, considering the fragmentary approach Petterson uses. Big in the sense that every page seems loaded with meaning, as if even Trond's stumbling around his run-down cabin hides a secret parallel with an earlier part of his life, or else foreshadows things to come. This sort of storytelling almost promises a compelling denouement, though if that is what the reader is lookng for, he may feel cheated. Instead, Petterson hews closer to reality, shunning the contrived shortcuts fiction is capable of and portrays a complex man who has no more answers to his life's meaning than any of the rest of us.

I found Petterson's style very rustic and refreshing - like a drink of water from a clear stream, or a walk through an untended, leafy wood.... Though this may not be entirely apt, he seemed to strip his narrative of any modernity, or at least seperate it from a materialistic point of view. There is nothing concrete in the story to support that feeling, it is more of a general sense I had from his crafting of the novel. Unfortunately, I also found it almost too tenuous in its connections, and some events at the beginning a little too coincidental. Petterson even addresses that, saying (as Trond) after one such event that if he'd read it in a book, he would have disliked it.

In one sense, 'Out Stealing Horses' could be considered a coming of age story - a genre I usually am not interested in - but in another, deeper sense, I believe Trond revisits this critical summer in his youth subconciously looking for connections to the life that followed from it. Not so much a 'coming of age' story then, but an examination of the past to determine personal meaning. If there are any clues, he knows that they lie in this remote part of his life, but as I mentioned before, Petterson arrives at the same answers we all do when embarking on such a errand. Because he does so with such a poetic pace and with calmly quiet observations though, it is a sublime task for us to follow along.

'Out Stealing Horses' is not liable to become a classic in and of itself - I do not think it has quite that much staying power - but as a meditation on the intertwining of past and present, it is powerful without plucking at the reader's emotions, or sliding into melancholy. Simple and intelligent, there is room for different interpretations, and at the same time, it is a relief from the frenetic page turners churned out by publishers today. Petterson has created a calm and quiet place, one perfectly suited for the tale he has to tell. Read more ›

106 of 114 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Memory and Essence July 29, 2007

By Libra

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

This book is the deserved winner of various prestigious literary awards, and has received considerable critical acclaim as an important work of literature. Translated from Norwegian, the prose is simple although a bit sparse, but both the piecemeal unfolding of the story and the abrupt chronological changes complicate Petterson's novel. The narrative begins in November of 1999, and is told in first person by 67 year old Trond, who has just isolated himself in a remote forest village in Norway where he plans to live out the rest of the years alloted him.

After the first twelve pages, in which he does not divulge a whole lot about himself, Trond begins relating an incident from 1948 when he was fifteen, and so he continues switching back and forth from the last months of 1999 to a period ranging from 1948 to 1942. The major part of the novel takes place during this latter time span. Because of the way that the narrative develops, I did not feel that I knew the whole story until I had read the very last line--"and we do decide for ourselves when it will hurt." This line first appears in the second chapter and runs like a refrain throughout the story. The episodes that Trond recalls in a rather elliptical fashion deal with formative events from his adolescence. During this period, he spent a summer with his father in a remote forest village in Norway, learned about his father's resistance activities during World War II, and suffered the loss of his father.

Outside of his memories from this adolescent past, Trond tells the reader little about his life. The novel as a whole, however, is extremely powerful. Upon finishing the book, I found it completely logical that a man in the last stages of his life would reflect back upon a time when his identity was formed.... Trond's selective memories are inextricable from the essence of the person he has become. Whether he has turned out to be the hero of his own life, the pages of Trond's story (like the pages of David Copperfield's story) must show! Read more ›

157 of 176 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book July 30, 2007

By Mark Mussari

Format:Hardcover

Petterson has crafted a finely written and imagery-laden book in which the relationship between setting and personality is truly symbiotic. I found the book engrossing without the slightest hint of emotional sensationalism or intellectual posturing. Instead the narrator (Trond) comes across as painfully real, and the use of flashbacks and back story are integral to the entire narrative, not a simple plot device. Trond is a memorable, relatable character who in his youth experiences changes that cast a long shadow far into his adulthood. The writing maintains an excellence throughout rarely encountered in contemporary lit, and Petterson discloses a fine ear for dialogue and a strong yet subtle sense of narrative movement. One of the best novels out of Scandinavia in years.

114 of 127 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Lyrical memories of war and betrayal May 29, 2007

By Nimbolina

Format:Hardcover

This is one of the best novels to come out of Scandinavia in recent years. Written from the point of view of a 70-year old man reflecting on the time he spent with his father near the Swedish border during the Second World War, the narrative present of the novel alternates back and forth between his current solitude and his adolescent confusion over his father's wartime activities. The novel is enormously sad and haunting, and the language beautifully simple and evocative.

37 of 38 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Magnificent Gem of a Novel March 8, 2008

By B. Case VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

"Out Stealing Horses," by Per Petterson, is a magnificent gem of a novel. It's a contemplative book that slowly builds momentum for the compelling mystery of human suffering at its core. The story is constructed around a bare sliver of a plot, but there is enormous emotional impact in the telling. The prose is deceptively simple, but so vivid with nuanced detail that the reader immediately becomes caught up and lost in the telling.

The book takes place in 1999 with frequent flashbacks to 1948. The story concerns Trond Sander, a 67-year-old man coming to terms with his aging body and still grieving three years after the deaths of his wife and sister. Telling no one, not even his two grown daughters, Trond takes his pension and moves to an isolated lakeside cabin in the wilds of northern Norway. There he plans to live out the rest of his life in quiet solitude. He spends his days repairing his ideally situated but ramshackle cabin, taking walks with his beloved dog, absorbing the beauty of nature that fill his senses with pleasure at every turn, and dealing with the mundane necessities of everyday life. He has an acute desire to be alone, and is, in every way, perfectly content with this isolation.

Circumstances bring Trond together with one of his neighbors, Lars Haug, another solitary man. It doesn't take both men very long to realize that they share a mysterious common heritage of heartache some fifty years earlier when Trond was 15 and Lars was a 10-year-old neighbor boy, the little brother of his close friend Jon. Long dormant memories are awakened, old wounds opened; yet both men avoid discussing their common history of emotional pain.

It is this mystery of what really happened between their two families in the summer of 1948 that holds the book together.... Slowly, over the course of the novel, bits and pieces of their shared history become known. Petterson artfully chooses to reveal mere tidbits of facts, barely hinting at any deeper emotional impact, always leaving questions unanswered. The author leaves it up to the reader to put the pieces together, and add meaning to the whole. In order to do this, readers must use their own experience to help them supply feelings, opinions and assumptions about each character's motivations. This technique is certainly the genius behind this novel: it makes the reader an active participant in the figuring out all the "what," "how," and "why" of events. Among any group of readers discussing this book, there will be significant differences in how the events are interpreted and found meaningful. That is why this book has such a profound emotional impact: readers must take it into their hearts and make it meaningful in terms of their own life experiences.

There is a lovely passage early in the book when Trond is thinking about his quiet, arms-length assimilation into the village community near his cabin. This passage is noteworthy because it reveals not only a great deal about the main character's personality and mature understanding of life, but also lets readers in on how the author plans to reveal Trond's story over the course of the novel. In this passage, Trond thinks about his basic interactions with village people and reasons:

"People like it when you tell them things, in suitable 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 facts, not feelings, not what your opinion is about anything at all, not how what has happened to you and how all the decisions you have made have turned you into who you are. What they do is they fill in with their own feelings and opinions and assumptions, and they compose a new life which has precious little to do with yours, and that lets you off the hook" (page 73).

So, don't be surprised at the end of this book when you find the author doesn't put himself on a hook and reveal every crucial detail about how the events actually play out. Enjoy finding your own meaning, and trusting your own interpretation. If you do, you'll join legions of readers around the world who hold this book close to their hearts.

This book gets my unqualified highest recommendation. Read more ›