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Out Stealing Horses: A Novel | 
 enlarge | Author: Per Petterson
Creator: Anne Born
Publisher: Picador
Category: Book
List Price: $14.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  102 reviews
Sales Rank: 247
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1st
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.8
ISBN: 0312427085
Dewey Decimal Number: 839.82374
EAN: 9780312427085
ASIN: 0312427085
Publication Date: April 29, 2008
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Product Description
NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
A TIME MAGAZINE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
WINNER OF THE IMPAC DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD
Out Stealing Horses has been embraced across the world as a classic, a novel of universal relevance and power. Panoramic and gripping, it tells the story of Trond Sander, a sixty-seven-year-old man who has moved from the city to a remote, riverside cabin, only to have all the turbulence, grief, and overwhelming beauty of his youth come back to him one night while he's out on a walk. From the moment Trond sees a strange figure coming out of the dark behind his home, the reader is immersed in a decades-deep story of searching and loss, and in the precise, irresistible prose of a newly crowned master of fiction.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 97 more reviews...
 Loss and recovery; hurt and compensation; pain and survival November 22, 2008
Per Petterson is a subtle and sensitive storyteller. In his novel Out Stealing Horses, he uses a post-modern shifting of time between a young man on the verge of adulthood and the same man more than 50 years later, with only vague hints as to life lived between that eventful adolescence and the onset of an old age seeking isolation.
In the novel, Trond is seen as a young man becoming sexually aware, but also strongly attached to his best friend Jon and to his virile, action oriented father. Much of his life, especially his youth, is highly influenced by a series of events that occur around World War II in which a terrible accident at a neighbor's home leads to the loss of his best friend Jon and eventually to the abandonment of his family by his father for a neighbor's wife.
Much of the structure of the novel is a series of actions on the part of Trond's father, which are initially mysterious but eventually are revealed, to which Trond reacts as an adolescent and upon which he later reflects. As Trond grows ever more mature, he unwittingly gives his father stronger self-justification to abandon the family for his affair with a neighbor's beautiful wife. The abandonment of his family is subtly portrayed here since the feelings of anger and resentment may be deeply buried under the awe of a father who at times displayed heroic action and risk.
For Trond, his maturity offered a justification for the abandonment, thus giving a sense of guilt where none should be felt. There is a wonderful passage in the book where Trond and his father go into Sweden to check on the logs they have sent downriver to the sawmills and to un-wedge any logs stuck in the shallows. Trond does not realize at the time that these logs are meant to be a cash payment for the family once the father leaves home. The father does not want to leave the family without resources and so he works diligently to do some logging to get a small amount of money to leave his wife, daughter, and son. A stack of logs are found and Trond figures out how to dislodge them, demonstrating to his father that he is mature, takes responsibility, and can solve practical problems. Trond's father feels pride but also now feels less guilty about leaving his family for he feels that Trond has become a man.
There is a sense of sadness and loss that permeates the book. A terrible accident at the neighbor's home results in his best friend leaving the home and returning only many years later. Trond's father leaves the family and Trond never sees him again. The reader gets the impression that this loss of the father permeates Trond's life, though Trond's two marriages and children are only briefly mentioned, and carries forward even as he reaches age 67 and is attempting to retire into solitude.
The book is beautifully written. The descriptions of the Norwegian rural wilderness are vivid and yet not overdone or over emphasized. I was left with an overall appreciation for Petterson's descriptive art, and his ability to convey the cycles of loss and recovery, hurt and compensation, pain and survival, that are integral to the human experience.
 A Book I Read Slowly November 12, 2008
I don't read as much as I would like and that is usually my fault. Sometimes it is the book's fault for not pulling me in. This one had no trouble and the sparse prose is perfectly descriptive of the state of mind of both the man and boy in this novel. I felt I could almost smell the air in the book with barely a word to describe it, but somehow it comes across. The writing is simple yet leaves you touched by this character's experience. It is like wandering into a room you used to inhabit as a child. You can pinpoint the exact smell but something pulls a flood of emotion back into your consciousness that has been lost somewhere. This book feels like that throughout and is one of the best books I have read since "East of Eden". Like life, it is neither happy nor sad, but simply is what we make of it.
 Gave up on page 52 November 11, 2008
My expectations were high, but I couldn't talk myself into reading past page 52. It wasn't awful, just very flat for my taste. I wasn't particularily taken by the writing, as many have raved about, nor was I at all interested in the characters. Nothing here for me...
A beautifully crafted novel November 10, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
This is one of the best novels I've read in years, and (in my opinion) one of the finest works of the past few decades. A story that begins (unpromisingly in my initial assessment) with a teenage boy spending his summer in the Norwegian countryside, twists and turns most unexpectedly. Like all great novels, it is ultimately about life and the challenge of living it well. The characters are complex, the story absorbing, the lesson - no man is an island - timeless. I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys great literature.
 Norwegian Hemingway November 6, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I don't know if it was the translator or Per Petterson, but one of them captured Hemingway's rhythm almost perfectly. This is the main character, Trond Sander describing how his father, some neighbors and he cut trees to be floated downstream to a Swedish lumber mill: "...when you are in the swing, and all of you have fallen into a good rhythm, the beginning and the end have no meaning at all, not there, not then, and the only vital thing is that you keep going until everything merges into a single pulse that beats and works under its own steam, and you take a break at the right time and you work again, and you eat enough but not too much, and you drink enough but not too much, and sleep well when the times comes; eight hours at night, and at least one hour during the day."
Nothing much happens in the story. Trond, a sixty-seven-year old man moves to a cabin north of Oslo. His wife has recently died and he wants to be alone, but he meets a man named Lars who turns out to be somebody he knows from his youth. The story flashes back to the last time Trond had seen his father, who eventually left his family. The story flashes further back to the time Trond's father fought for the Norwegian resistance during World War II. And that's how he met Lars' mother, whom he would leave his family for. Then there's the curious statement "Out stealing horses," which was a code for a messenger carrying papers between Germany and Sweden. It was the same expression Lars' brother Jon used when he and Trond would go to a neighbor's corral and ride the horses there, pretending to be stealing them. Jon was so consumed by the horses and other mischief that he forgot he was supposed to watch his little brothers and there was a terrible accident.
The adult Trond Sanders is a moody, moody man who is more consumed by his father's abandonment than he is by his family. When his daughter comes to see him, he's not even sure he wants to see her. He relates better to his dog, Lyra, than he does to human beings. We know Trond was married and has two daughters but we learn nothing about his wife and the other daughter is invisible.
Readers will be frustrated by the lack of resolution. We assume Trond's father raised Lars, but we never find out for sure. Trond seems afraid to ask. Perhaps Trond is hesitant because he doesn't want to establish a human relationship with Lars. Although Lars recognizes Trond and vice versa, they spend an entire afternoon sawing a tree that has fallen in Trond's yard, but their conversation is never more significant than a discussion of the weather. Petterson seemed to be aiming for emotional impact rather than story resolution. I did feel sorry for Trond, but I also wanted to kick him in the butt.
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