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Our Story Begins: "Out Stealing Horses," Part I
Published: 7/13/2008 4:12 PM
Last Modified: 7/13/2008 4:12 PM

I think most people, when they start to read a novel, have at least some small idea of the sort of story they are about to read. They’ve read a review of the book, or heard it discussed on the radio, or simply read the description of the story on the book’s cover.

That’s always been the case with me – I can’t remember the last book I read that I did not know anything about before turning to the first page.

So when the decision was made for the Tulsa World to explore having an online book club – or, at least, something of the sort – I decided to try an experiment. We’re all new to this sort of thing, so why not select a book about which I knew next to nothing?

“Out Stealing Horses” has been one of the most highly praised books of the last year – winning international awards, being chosen as a “Best Book of the Year” by publications that make those sorts of lists.

I’ve always tried to keep up with what is going on in the world of books, but “Out Stealing Horses” was one of those books that completely escaped my notice. Never heard of the book, never heard of its author, before those “Books of the Year” lists started appearing. Then, when the book came out in paperback, it began appearing regularly at the top of the Indie Bestseller List, meaning that it was selling briskly at the country’s independent bookstores.

So: If we’re going to discuss a book, why not this one? Let’s see what all the fuss is about.

I went so far as to buy my copy almost sight-unseen. I did not read the brief description of the story on the back cover, did not read the blurbs that fill the first couple of pages. I knew the writer, Per Petterson, is Norwegian, but that was it as far as doing any preparation. I simply turned to the first page of the text and started reading.

I’m about one-third of the way through the story as I write this – page 74, the start of chapter 6. Here’s what has been going through the mind while reading “Out Stealing Horses.”
Hemingway: There are a lot of aspects of this book that call to mind Hemingway’s early work. The style, especially in the first chaper: a present-tense description of the narrator, Trond, settling into a new home in a remote region of Norway, and the night he meets his closest neighbor, Lars, who is out looking for his dog. It is an unsettling scene: in part because the neighbor’s story about why he wouldn’t be able to shoot his dog if he ever needed to put the animal down; in part because of the vaguely supernatural appearance of the dog and its strangely menacing behaviour; and in part because of Trond’s clipped sentences, always short and to the point, as if holding himself tightly in control. You can sense, more from the tone of the story than from the events of the story, that something terrible is going to happen.

Story Into Novel: Chapter Two begins with the sentence, “We were going out stealing horses.” The title phrase is repeated a number of times in this section, in which Trond recalls how, as a youngster, he and his friend Jon would sneak onto the property of the man who owned the land the boys’ families either worked (in the case of Jon’s family) or visited (in the case of Trond and his father – a sister and mother are left behind in the city for these trips) and pretend to rustle the man’s corralled horses. The boys never actually steal anything, other than a few moments’ thrill as they try to emulate moves they have seen actors in Western films do.
This particular day, things do not go well. Trond gets thrown from the horse he tries to leap upon, Jon then leads him up into a tree to show him a bird’s nest and the egg within it. Then Jon deliberately drops the egg and smashes the nest to dust, slips out of the tree and stalks off to the boat they used to get to the horses.
It has the oddly self-contained feel of a short story, and I wonder if Petterson wrote this section first, and from it came the rest of the novel. Again, you get the feeling that, while you are seeing everything as Trond remembers seeing it, you are not seeing everything.
The language is still very simple, very clear, but the sentences are no longer short and declarative. They tend to run on, the way a young person telling a story will, in the excitement of unfolding the narrative, let the niceties of grammar fall away. We know that the “present day” Trond of the first chapter is in his late 60s; but the voice of the “past” Trond of the following chapters is not that of an older person looking back, but of a young person experiencing things first-hand, for the first time.

Doom: These first-time experiences include a funeral – a member of Jon’s family. Trond hears about it from his father, after Trond has told him of Jon’s odd behaviour, and Trond’s father tells him the facts as a way of perhaps explaining Jon’s actions.
And it starts becoming obvious that this death so long ago is at the heart of why Trond is now in this ramshackle house in the Norwegian countryside, and that we as readers are able to see things that the young Trond cannot – the way Trond’s father interacts with Jon’s father at the funeral, the way Jon’s mother shows up when the men of the region (with the notable exceptions of Jon and his father) gather to help the landowner reap and dry his hay. Perhaps Trond’s father and Jon’s mother have a relationship that goes beyond the neighborly. Might that be why Jon acts the way he did, why Trond mentions that his father “vanished from my life forever” when Trond was 15 – just a few years after the events we’ve just read?

Maybe I Read Too Closely: The tone and language of the book is so controlled and exact that the slightest word out of place can jar. For example, Trond is writing about a visit to town in the present day, to repair a headlight on his car and buy some provisions. He is talking about how everyone in town prefers to drive even the shortest of distances, but he does not.
“The Co-op is a hundred metres away,” goes a line at the bottom of page 66, “but I am the only one who walks outwith the parking place.”
That isn’t a typo on my part: the text has the word “outwith.” And the dictionaries I have close to hand do not include that word.
A foul-up in typesetting? Or the first chink in the protective sheath of self-control that Trond presents to the world. After all, the next page has him saying of other people: “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 how what has happened to you and how all the decision you have made have turned you into who you are.”
Maybe that is what we are to find out, in the rest of “Out Stealing Horses.”

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