Books |
Out Stealing Horses
Per Petterson
By
Published: May 27, 2009
Category:
Fiction
I’ve had this book for two years. Every once in a while, I’ve picked it up, but never for long. I can’t say why. Certainly not the length, for the novel is just 250 pages. Maybe the awards — this is a very honored book — made me think it’s “literary” fiction. It’s not.
Recently I sat in my window seat and, once again, started Out Stealing Horses, and then I sat on a riverbank and finished it. Both experiences were memorable, but especially turning pages in the sun as wind gusted off the river, for this is not only one of the best novels I’ve read in years, it gives you (well, me, anyway) an almost physical hunger for air, sun, trees and water. Not surprising, considering that Trond Sander, the 67-year-old narrator, has just moved from Oslo to a house deep in the woods of Norway. Yes, it’s kind of a retreat. It’s also a joy:
All my life I have longed to be alone in a place like this. Even when everything was going well, as it often did. I can say that much. That it often did. I have been lucky. But even then, for instance in the middle of an embrace and someone whispering words in my ear I wanted to hear, I could suddenly get a longing to be in a place where there was only silence. Years might go by and I did not think about it, but that does not mean that I did not long to be there. And now I am here, and it is almost exactly as I had imagined it.
Sagging house. A river. Trees to cut for the fire. An old car. No phone. A chance to sleep and rest. Thinking? Inevitable, but not a priority.
Have you had this dream? I think we all do. But reality intrudes even in the Norwegian woods. A few pages into the book, a neighbor’s dog goes missing, and in the dead of night, Trond goes out to see what’s up. Like any encounter in the dark of the woods, this resonates — but as we’ll see, it also resonates across decades.
Chapter 2. 1948. Trond’s a kid, here in the woods at the house where he and his father will live for the summer. With his friend Jon, he’s going to a neighbor’s meadow to “steal” horses — that is, take an unauthorized ride. After, Jon finds the egg of a goldcrest. I don’t want to say what he does and why he does it, but it’s brutal and shocking. All too soon, you’ll understand why. And — again, I’m not saying what happened — you will be stunned. As we all are when great events in our lives occur without any distractions, so that we’re forced to look at them and deal with them.
The book moves from 1999 to 1948 and then, even earlier, to the Germans marching through Oslo and Trond’s father working in the Resistance. The time shifts are seamless — I want to say that Trond is a gifted narrator, but the right answer is that Per Petterson, whose fifth novel this is, is a marvelous writer. (And let me take a second here to say how great it is that all the really sharp New York publishers rejected this book and Graywolf, a small non-profit in Minneapolis, had the honor of releasing it.)
There are days in the fields here that are so beautiful you feel you’re in them. I’m especially in love with the scenes of cutting spruce or bundling hay. The rhythm of the scythe. The sweat. Sleeping in the fields. If you’ve visited New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, you may have stood — as I often do, and for a long time — in front of The Harvesters, painted in 1565 by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Four centuries later, in Norway, I picture a scene very much like it.
In 1565, though, people rarely traveled more than 30 miles from home. In the 20th Century, the Germans tried to conquer the world. The occupation of an enemy in your homeland — we Americans don’t understand that, but it’s a wound that rips the lives of the characters in this novel. And it’s a scar that never fades. Just as that thing with Jon echoes across decades.
“Out Stealing Horses” is a story told indirectly. When it’s over, there’s much you don’t know. But that’s not to say you’ll close the book with nagging questions, for Petterson tells you everything you need to know. And he does it so artfully, so subtly, that although this is far from a “literary” novel, you won’t want to skip a word.
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