Out Stealing Horses: A Novel - Dark Publications

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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.

Customer Reviews: Read 106 more reviews...

5 out of 5 stars

Excellent book July 30, 2007
123 out of 137 found this review helpful

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.

5 out of 5 stars

Lyrical memories of war and betrayal May 29, 2007
74 out of 80 found this review helpful

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.

3 out of 5 stars

Sumptuous Prose, but Largely Redundant February 8, 2008
72 out of 82 found this review helpful

Picking up this novel (translated from its original Norwegian), it is easy to understand why "Out Stealing Horses" has earned such high praise from critics; its author, Per Petterson, is a writer of astonishing talent. There are moments where his astute observations and beautiful descriptions sent chills down my spine. Petterson's depth of understanding for his main character, Trond, is palpable, and he is carefully rendered in an achingly believable portrait of an aging, grieving man. The novel's setting gets an equally loving respect from Petterson, whose description of Norway's trees, rivers, and skies should do wonders for the country's tourism ("I shut my eyes into a squint and looked across the water flowing past below the window, shining and glittering like a thousand stars, like the Milky Way could sometimes do in the autumn rushing foamingly on and winding through the night in an endless stream"). I would compare Petterson's writing to the heartaching beauty of Pulitzer Prize winner Marilynne Robinson's prose (her novel Housekeeping: A Novel is every bit as poetic and haunting as this one). The problem I have with this otherwise stellar book is that I feel like I've read it before - many times at that.

"Out Stealing Horses" finds Trond Sander living in a self-inflicted isolation as he heads into his twilight years. He has given up his former life for a solitary existence partially out of a life-long yearning to be left alone, but mostly out of grief for the sudden death of his beloved wife three years earlier. But when he realizes that his neighbor is a figure from his past it triggers a host of feelings and memories that Trond has been trying to avoid for a long time, and in flashbacks we are taken back with him to the summer of his fifteenth year - a summer that forever altered the course of his life, where friendly games of stealing horses gave way to tragedy and coming of age. Petterson acquits himself well enough in the unspooling of the narrative, but anyone who has ever read a Booker Prize winning novel will find the premise a little too familiar (The God of Small Things, The Sea, and The Gathering (Man Booker Prize), to name only a few, all have a similar premise with the main character reflecting on their tragic past). But the real shame of it is that "Out Stealing Horses" peters out in the climax, leaving it without the oomph that might have distinguished it from those novels. And what we are left with is a painfully standard story told with stunningly beautiful writing. I wanted to like the novel more than I did because of Petterson's talent as a writer, but the truth is that I just couldn't shake the boredom in the end. Which is quite a shame, because Petterson has a lot more to offer.

Grade: C+

5 out of 5 stars

2007 Dublin Impac Award Winner July 15, 2007
42 out of 46 found this review helpful

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.

5 out of 5 stars

Memory and Essence July 29, 2007
36 out of 37 found this review helpful

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!

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