Out Stealing Horses, by Per Petterson
By Peter on Dec 3, 2007 in Excellent book, Fiction Books, Norwegian Writer, Per Petterson, bestseller, book review
Cowboys in the Wild West stole horses. In Norway nobody steals horses, not today, not ever. I think. And I am Norwegian and definitely not a cowboy from the Wild West. Therefore, I never really liked the title of Per Petterson’s book. So I did the right thing. The only option open to me, really. I skipped it. I chose not to read it. You simply can’t compromise yourself by reading books whose titles you don’t like. 
But then all those strange things started to happen. It won prizes and high praise, was translated to one language after the other, and won recognition both in Norway and lots of other countries. Of course, I noticed all of this, but I managed to distance myself from it all. For a long time. After all, what did foreigners and Americans know about horse thieves, or the lack thereof, in Norway? But then, to make things worse, my friends started telling me that this was a book I really had to read, a wonderful book, a pleasure to read. One of them even had the nerve to place the book right in my angle of sight. So, well, I decided I had to taste those sour grapes. That way I could at least tell everybody why I thought this book was bad, based on more than just the title.
Alas, that was not to be. After just a few pages I fell in love with the book. It all started, I think, with me smiling while reading. I even laughed. And I read passages out load for my friend. And I enjoyed the book, a lot. The book was not exactly as I had imagined.
Viewed from the outside the book is relatively straight forward. 67 year old Trond moves to a house by a lake in the forest, in the Eastern part of Norway. Here he lives alone with his dog, and spends his time with repairing the house and other small practical tasks. “All my life I have wanted to be alone in a place like this. Even when life was at its finest, as it has often been” (My translation from Norwegian). But things change for Trond. Meetings with the neighbor living in the cabin a little further down the road evoke difficult memories for Trond. Memories about his father, about the summer of 1948 when he was 15 years old, and about events taking place that summer which were hard to understand for a fifteen year old boy. We flash back and relive those events with Trond, and then we follow the consequences they have for the mature Trond 52 years later. The story is good, and it is told with great skill.
But it wasn’t only the story that made me love this book. It was actually mostly the language – that beautiful, slightly remote, and very moderate and crisp language that Petterson has chosen for his story. A form perfect for making those things – small and large – that happen in the book stand out on their own accord in my interpretation only. A style of language that delivers joyful, happy, sad, tragical as well as beautiful events and scenes to me in such a raw, unprocessed form that is makes me need and want to reflect and ponder their implications and interrelations, and more or less forces me to relate to what I read.
In addition, I loved all those cute, interesting, staggering and mind-blowing observations, thoughts and reflections about life, being, and nothingness made by Trond. About the trivia of daily life, life in general, the goings on in the world at large, where Trond’s particular point in life, situation, and context for interpretation on the one hand lends the story credibility and on the other hand provides a unique perspective that makes a lot of things take on meaning that differ a lot from more common meanings and interpretations. Lot of joy, lots of food for thought.
So, it may – that much I can maybe concede – have been a bad choice by me not to read the book earlier. But then, on the other hand, there is this beautiful thing about books – quite different from newspapers and tech-thingies – that makes it possible to read them a tad late and still enjoy. And this is art. A masterpiece actually. The value of art transcends time and place. Its value isn’t even reduced over time. So?
– Peter
Buy this book from amazon.com
You must be logged in to post a comment.