BR; Out Stealing Horses (Per Petterson)

Amazon Link: Out Stealing Horses

The back cover reads:

"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."

This book went onto my wish list last year, and into my shopping bag this year while I was in the States. I finished reading it this morning on the train, several stops before my station. I expected resolution, a clearer explanation of Trond's psychology, his physiology even, but the book completed the story of his youth but not the story of his life. It is how it should be, and as I closed the novel in my lap and stared out the window at the city gliding past, I felt content in having experienced this journey with Trond.

He is a man who has chosen isolation, yet is unable to escape his past. Coincidence brings him a neighbour from a tragic incident many, many years before and all Trond's expectations for a solitary existence are nullified by the other man's rough companionship.

As with all great novels, animals feature heavily and their presence is not as decoration or distraction, but as a means by which the characters shift and change. Trond and Lars each have a dog, Lyra and Poker, and the two animals are strangely representative of their masters.

Trond remembers his youth and his memories are rich with a summer he spent with his father in Norway when he was 15 years old. His relationship with his father is mature, honest, absorbingly touching and ultimately saddening. One scene, whether father and son dance stark naked in the pouring rain, is hilarious and beautiful. Trond's father loves his son, respects and protects him, offering guidance and advice where necessary, and trusting distance when Trond needs to figure things out for himself. Despite their sometimes hard life, Trond is not for want of love, which makes the life his father chooses that much harder to take.

Trond's father taught him that "... we decide for ourselves when it will hurt." The lesson was in how to deal with a painfully prickly weed infestation, but this is the arc of the novel, the underlying subtext that needs multiple reads and a good book-club session to understand.

He reads Dickens, and relates some of the things that happens to stories he read long past.

... when you read Dickens you're reading a long ballad from a vanished world,
where everything has to come together in the end like an equation, where the
balance of what was once disturbed must be restored so that the gods can smile
again. A consolation, maybe, or a protest against a world gone off the rails,
but it is not like that any more, my world is not like that, and I have never
gone along with those who believe our lives are governed by fate. They whine,
they wash their hands and crave pity. I believe we shape our lives ourselves, at
any rate I have shaped mine, for what it's worth, and I take complete
responsibility. But of all the places I might have moved to, I had to land up
precisely here.

He works hard to maintain distance from people, giving them snippets of information and insight, but nothing that will reveal who he really is.

People like it when you tell them things, in suitable portions, in a modest,
intimate tone, and they think they know you, but they do not, they know about you, for what they are let in on are facts, not feelings, not what your opinion is about anything at all, not how what has happened to you and all the decisions you have made have turned you into who you are. What they do is they fill in with their own feelings and opinions and assumptions, and they compose a new life which has precious little to do with yours, and that lets you off the hook. No-one can touch you unless you yourself want them to. You only have to be polite and smile and keep paranoid thoughts at bay, because they will talk about you no matter how much you squirm, it is inevitable, and you would do the same thing yourself.

This book requires a second, third or maybe even fourth read to appreciate the subtext. It's an enjoyable read, even just for the scenery, the Norwegian and Swedish landscape and history. It's much more than that though, and it's failure to spell everything out is the richest reward of all.

Rating: *****1/2 out of five.