Recently Per Petterson was awarded the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his novel Out Stealing Horses; it is the world’s largest literary prize for a single work of fiction published in English (including books translated from other languages). He has also been awarded the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and two of the major Norwegian literary prizes (the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature and the Booksellers’ Best Book of the Year Award), and his novel was chosen by the editors of The New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of the year.
Out Stealing Horses is Petterson’s sixth book, confirming his stature among the most important writers in Norway today. His style is laconic, understated; like Hemingway, he’s a master of dialogue, and what remains unsaid is of central importance. There is always more in his sentences than meets the eye. Above all, he’s an intensely physical writer; Out Stealing Horses has that special quality that lets the reader smell the novel rather than just read it.
A theme that runs throughout Petterson’s books is relationships between family members. In his highly acclaimed novel To Siberia (which was also nominated for the IMPAC Award), Petterson takes on the perspective of a girl, but more typically, as in Out Stealing Horses, he focuses on the relationship between a son and his father. This is of course a well-known theme in literature, all the way back to Homer and Sophocles (not to mention Holy Scripture), and yet Petterson manages to make it fresh. Even when I read all his books in succession, as I have done, I don’t feel that I am getting simply more of the same; rather I’m being led deeper into the heart of the matter.
Petterson differs from many of his peers in contemporary Norwegian literature, who have their roots in the radical Left of the 1970s. Unlike Dag Solstad, for example— probably the most famous living writer in Norway today—Petterson hasn’t written on explicitly “political” themes. Instead, he has stuck to big questions as they are worked out in everyday life, especially in the family setting.
One other bit of background worth mentioning: Petterson’s worked for years in a famous bookstore in Oslo (called Tronsmo). In that connection he came to know many of the most important writers of the day, but he was a late starter in his own literary career, due to a combination of high ambitions and low self-esteem. Writing didn’t come easily for him.
His first book, published in 1987, was a collection of linked short stories set in Oslo in the 1950s, mainly focusing on the little boy Arvid Jansen and his relationship with his dad. Arvid, who is to some extent autobiographical, has become a recurring figure in Petterson’s subsequent books. Two of these novels (prior to Out Stealing Horses) have been translated into English. The girl portrayed in To Siberia is Arvid’s mother, who, like Petterson’s own mother, is Danish. And In the Wake recounts Arvid’s loss of his parents, even as he celebrates his debut as an author. This too draws on Petterson’s experience: in 1990, three years after his first book was published, he lost his mother and father, one of his brothers, and a cousin in the tragic fire on the ferry Scandinavian Star.
In the Wake, which was published in Norway in 2000, includes a small section that Arvid (the fictional author) writes, describing it as a “possible future.” The very same section is the opening of Out Stealing Horses, originally published three years later. What this suggests is that Out Stealing Horses is “written by” Arvid, Petterson’s principal recurring character, as he reflects on the loss of his parents.
So what is Out Stealing Horses really about? Exactly that, the loss of a father. We’ll come to that later.
When the novel starts, it’s November 1999, and the 67-year-old Trond (the narrator) has just moved to a little house in a particularly quiet part of Norway. There’s another man living in a cottage nearby, but Trond’s only companion so far is his dog, Lyra. He usually gets up early to read yesterday’s papers, listen to the BBC on the radio, and watch the birds come fluttering in to his bird table when it gets light: “All my life,” he thinks, “I have longed to be 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.” The reader can be pretty sure that something not so good is soon to follow.
The narrative makes frequent jumps between Trond’s present and past. The old man hasn’t been bothered with thoughts about his youth for many years, but after an encounter with Lars Haug, the man in the neighboring cottage, the memories come flooding back. In 1948, the 15-year-old Trond spent the summer in a countryside cabin together with his father. There he became friends with a boy called Jon, who had two younger brothers, twins called Lars and Odd. Now, in 1999, Trond realizes that Lars Haug is the same Lars he met that summer—the boy who shot his twin in the heart, by accident, when he was ten years old.
From this memory, the story of Trond’s past starts to unfold. The incident—a shot in the heart, from a twin brother—might strike some readers as a bit too melodramatic, especially given the coincidence of meeting Lars again just like that, after fifty years. Petterson anticipates this reaction, and disarms it with irony: Trond says, “Lars is Lars even though I saw him last when he was ten years old, and now he’s past sixty, and if this had been something in a novel it would just have been irritating.” (Indeed, in this novel and throughout his fiction, Petterson’s black humor is not merely adequate, but steers the ship off the rocks in an elegant way.)
The accidental killing presents a stark contrast to the rest of the novel, which operates with small but effective scenes and imagery—for example, the scene in which Trond’s friend Jon crushes a bird’s nest with his bare hands. It’s Trond and Jon who are “out stealing horses.” The process is described early in the novel, where the two boys ride their neighbor’s horses without permission—not “stealing,” exactly, but serious mischief.
The primary function of the novel’s title is to evoke the atmosphere that saturates the book. We’re in the country, in the woods, as if we were going back in time. We’re talking timber, and we’re smelling it, too:
There was a scent of new-felled timber. It spread from the track-side to the river, it filled the air and drifted across the water and penetrated everything everywhere and made me numb and dizzy. I was in the thick of it all. I smelled of resin, my clothes smelled, and my hair smelled, and my skin smelled of resin when I lay in my bed at night. I went to sleep with it and woke up with it and it stayed with me all the day long. I was forest.
Trond is a Norwegian counterpart to the American cowboy, a lonesome and practical philosopher, or, quite simply, the old man in the woods.
I mentioned Petterson’s affinities with Hemingway. Of course the novel also smells—in a positive way—of Knut Hamsun, particularly the novel Pan. But where Hamsun investigates the irrational corners of the mind, Petterson is more attuned to the rational ways of the body. As Trond puts it, when he and Lars are using their chainsaws on a big tree: “the movement first and then the comprehension.”
So what does all of this have to do with reflections on a lost father? I won’t give away too much of the plot, but something happened in the summer of 1948 that would dramatically change Trond’s relationship with his dad. Indeed, relatively early in the novel, we learn that after their summer holiday together, Trond never saw his father again.
In 1999, only Trond’s memories remain, especially the words his father once spoke to him: “You decide for yourself when it will hurt.” This becomes a key phrase for the whole book. It reflects not only the physical pain of the sometimes hard work in the forest but also, and more important, Trond’s pain as he looks back on the father who abandoned him. It hurts when a son leaves his father. But it hurts even more when a father leaves his son. “You decide for yourself when it will hurt” is a harsh bequest. And yet, this was perhaps the only survival strategy Trond’s father knew, and he wanted to pass it on to his son.
It hurts reading Out Stealing Horses, but this is the kind of pain you shouldn’t miss.
Alf Walgermo is a Norwegian writer and critic. He has published three books: one about the donkey in world literature, one about the 100 individuals who met Jesus according to the gospels, and one children’s book about a boy and his giraffe. Walgermo works for the Norwegian national daily newspaper Vart Land. Email: alf@vl.no.
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