Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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32 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A calm and quiet place, February 19, 2009
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.
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17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
So subtle it breaks your heart, March 12, 2009
I opened up this book with nary a familiarity with its author. I only knew that he was Norwegian and a prize winner in his native country.
I was immediately pulled in by the still beauty of the pace and the rich reflections of a man in his twilight years who has returned to live in the very place where his life was to have its initiation into manhood, starting with a summer when he was all of 12 years old.
I can understand why some readers may be shaking their heads. This is a story that deals with the slowness of deep inner emotions-- not unlike the movement of icebergs making their way in those frigid northern seas. We are given these pieces of Trond and there were times when I stopped reading and wondered why he was so intent telling us about that 12 year old self and that particular summer--until we enter that beautiful and chilling truth of what constituted the life Trond was to live from that time onward.
This is a beautiful read--and it's so strangely told that I almost did not get it. All I can say is, it is stunning when the light bulb alights in the dark corners of this old man's soul. (And you will get that moment. So keep reading!)
I so recommend this read because it's so seldom that I come across something that deals with emotions between fathers and sons, it's practically a taboo subject.
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51 of 60 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
2007 Dublin Impac Award Winner, July 15, 2007
In winning this year's Dublin IMPAC Award, Mr. Petterson's subtle novel beat out the works of such literary heavyweights as J.M. Coetzee, Cormac McCarthy, and Salman Rushdie. However, if you are looking for a straight forward chronological narrative, with a neat little story line, you may immediately strike this novel from your must read list.
Like two of his previous works, "In the Wake" and "To Siberia," Petterson's plots are clarified through the reflections of his main characters. In "Out Stealing Horses" we are presented with the views of an elderly man as he looks back on the ambivalent feelings he holds toward his father arising from an epoch summer they spent together in the backwoods of late 1940's Norway
As a greying baby boomer I think that one of the most redeeming features of the book lies in the way that it rejects the image of the insensitive male and allows us as a gender to unabashedly express our feelings of LOVE toward our fathers and sons.
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