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karieh13's review
4.0
One of the main events in Per Petterson’s novel, “Out Stealing Horses” is the felling, creating of and then float of logs down a river. The further I moved through this book, the more I felt that the flow of the author’s words resembled the pattern of those logs.
At times there seems a log jam as Patterson’s words are the bare minimum needed to move the story forward. Surroundings, actions, emotions are described, but in a trickle of words. Then the flow picks up and color enters the picture as his elegantly sparse prose fills in a bit. And then the force of bottled up thoughts, emotions, happenings rush at the reader with a fury; sentences become paragraphs, paragraphs become pages, and in the most glorious way, the reader fears drowning under the weight of the words.
The story seems a simple one. An older man, Trond Sander, moves to a small cabin in Norway to be alone, to revisit the place that was a defining moment of his youth, to think.
Trond is a man, were he real, and were I to meet him, who would greet me pleasantly, offer me a chair, and then minutes could pass with not a word. He seems to embody the very definition of companionable silence. (Or probably, in his case, uncomfortable silence due to his strong desire to be left alone.) And yet, his thoughts and memories are so beautifully drawn that one can understand why he is happy to be left alone with them.
“I can still feel the same thing today when I see a hayrack in a photograph from a book, but all that is a thing of the past now. No-one makes hay this way any more in this part of the country; today there is one man alone on a tractor, and then the drying on the ground and the mechanical turner and wrapping machines and huge plastic white cubes of stinking silage. So the feeling of pleasure slips into the feeling that time has passed, that it is very long ago, and the sudden feeling of being old.”
Several times Petterson lured me into a descriptive passage and then startled me with the finish. “When I sit here now, in the kitchen of the old house I have planned to make into a livable place in the years left to me, and my daughter has gone after a surprising visit and taken with her her voice and her cigarettes and the orange lights from her car down the road, and I look back to that time I see how each movement through the landscape took color from what came afterward and cannot be separated from it.”
At times there is a possibly sarcastic (?) element to Trond’s descriptions of events in his life, where he looks back at his younger self with eyes jaded with time.
“I pressed my nose against the glass and gazed into the cloud of dust slowly rising outside and hiding my father in a whirl of grey and brown, and I did everything you are supposed to do in a situation like that, in such a scene; I rose quickly and ran down the gangway between the seats to the last row and jumped up on it knees first and placed my hands on the window and stared up the road until the shop and the oak tree and my father had vanished round a bend, and all this is as if I had been thoroughly rehearsed in the film we have seen so often, where the fateful farewell is the crucial event and the lives of the protagonists are changed forever and take off in directions that are unexpected and not always nice, and the whole cinema audience knows just how it will turn out.”
This is balanced at times with quiet reverence for the experiences he has now. “Everything that was me lay taut and quivering just beneath my skin.”
This book, a reflection of a life lived although not completely understood, has flashes of pure luminosity.
“And it dawned on me that from that small patch of cobble stones I stood on there were lines going out in several directions, as in a precisely drawn diagram, with me standing in a circle in the middle, and today, more than fifty years later, I can close my eyes and clearly see those lines, like shining arrows, and if I did not see them quite as clearly that autumn day in Karlstad, I did know they were there, of that I am certain. And those lines were the different roads I could take, and having chosen one of them, the portcullis would come crashing down, and someone hoist the drawbridge up, and a chain reaction would be set in motion…”
Trond, and certainly not the reader, will ever get a complete account of what has happened in his life. And yet, there is enough. Enough joy, and pain, and beauty and despair…enough time, that when the story for the reader, and probably life for Trond, comes to an end, one does not feel shortchanged.
“If you were dead, you were dead, but in the fraction of a second just before; whether you realized then it was the end, and what that felt like. There was a narrow opening there, like a door barely ajar, that I pushed towards, because I wanted to get in, and there was a golden light in that crack that came from the sunlight on my eyelids , and then suddenly I slipped inside, and I was certain there for a little flash, and it did not frighten me at all, just made me sad and astonished at how quiet everything was.”
And the last line of this book, which I am desperate to include in this review but will not, this last line almost literally took my breath away with its force. After this last line, I set this book down carefully and with awe, and the story settled into place like that final log in the drift. And the river flows on.
At times there seems a log jam as Patterson’s words are the bare minimum needed to move the story forward. Surroundings, actions, emotions are described, but in a trickle of words. Then the flow picks up and color enters the picture as his elegantly sparse prose fills in a bit. And then the force of bottled up thoughts, emotions, happenings rush at the reader with a fury; sentences become paragraphs, paragraphs become pages, and in the most glorious way, the reader fears drowning under the weight of the words.
The story seems a simple one. An older man, Trond Sander, moves to a small cabin in Norway to be alone, to revisit the place that was a defining moment of his youth, to think.
Trond is a man, were he real, and were I to meet him, who would greet me pleasantly, offer me a chair, and then minutes could pass with not a word. He seems to embody the very definition of companionable silence. (Or probably, in his case, uncomfortable silence due to his strong desire to be left alone.) And yet, his thoughts and memories are so beautifully drawn that one can understand why he is happy to be left alone with them.
“I can still feel the same thing today when I see a hayrack in a photograph from a book, but all that is a thing of the past now. No-one makes hay this way any more in this part of the country; today there is one man alone on a tractor, and then the drying on the ground and the mechanical turner and wrapping machines and huge plastic white cubes of stinking silage. So the feeling of pleasure slips into the feeling that time has passed, that it is very long ago, and the sudden feeling of being old.”
Several times Petterson lured me into a descriptive passage and then startled me with the finish. “When I sit here now, in the kitchen of the old house I have planned to make into a livable place in the years left to me, and my daughter has gone after a surprising visit and taken with her her voice and her cigarettes and the orange lights from her car down the road, and I look back to that time I see how each movement through the landscape took color from what came afterward and cannot be separated from it.”
At times there is a possibly sarcastic (?) element to Trond’s descriptions of events in his life, where he looks back at his younger self with eyes jaded with time.
“I pressed my nose against the glass and gazed into the cloud of dust slowly rising outside and hiding my father in a whirl of grey and brown, and I did everything you are supposed to do in a situation like that, in such a scene; I rose quickly and ran down the gangway between the seats to the last row and jumped up on it knees first and placed my hands on the window and stared up the road until the shop and the oak tree and my father had vanished round a bend, and all this is as if I had been thoroughly rehearsed in the film we have seen so often, where the fateful farewell is the crucial event and the lives of the protagonists are changed forever and take off in directions that are unexpected and not always nice, and the whole cinema audience knows just how it will turn out.”
This is balanced at times with quiet reverence for the experiences he has now. “Everything that was me lay taut and quivering just beneath my skin.”
This book, a reflection of a life lived although not completely understood, has flashes of pure luminosity.
“And it dawned on me that from that small patch of cobble stones I stood on there were lines going out in several directions, as in a precisely drawn diagram, with me standing in a circle in the middle, and today, more than fifty years later, I can close my eyes and clearly see those lines, like shining arrows, and if I did not see them quite as clearly that autumn day in Karlstad, I did know they were there, of that I am certain. And those lines were the different roads I could take, and having chosen one of them, the portcullis would come crashing down, and someone hoist the drawbridge up, and a chain reaction would be set in motion…”
Trond, and certainly not the reader, will ever get a complete account of what has happened in his life. And yet, there is enough. Enough joy, and pain, and beauty and despair…enough time, that when the story for the reader, and probably life for Trond, comes to an end, one does not feel shortchanged.
“If you were dead, you were dead, but in the fraction of a second just before; whether you realized then it was the end, and what that felt like. There was a narrow opening there, like a door barely ajar, that I pushed towards, because I wanted to get in, and there was a golden light in that crack that came from the sunlight on my eyelids , and then suddenly I slipped inside, and I was certain there for a little flash, and it did not frighten me at all, just made me sad and astonished at how quiet everything was.”
And the last line of this book, which I am desperate to include in this review but will not, this last line almost literally took my breath away with its force. After this last line, I set this book down carefully and with awe, and the story settled into place like that final log in the drift. And the river flows on.
morganbird's review
4.0
I'm not entirely sure what to make of this book, yet, but I think I liked it.
maiamiga's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
medium-paced
3.75
Bonita historia narrada con gran sensibilidad donde la relación padre-hijo vertebra la trama, con personajes bien delineados psicológicamente y con una gran descripción del paisaje. Es verdad que quizá me esperaba un estilo algo más evocador y que el final para mi gusto queda un poco descolgado, como vacío, pero supongo que de lo que se trata al fin y al cabo es de contar ese pedazo de historia familiar con sus secretos, dramas, momentos tiernos y vivencias inolvidables que te cambian para siempre. Algo que destacó es que expone muy bien la vulnerabilidad masculina y la relación entre hombres cuando hay dolor y cariño de por medio.
kamrynharned's review
I just couldn’t get into it and I was not enjoying myself. Maybe I’m just not in the mood for a slow-paced character driven novel, but I could just tell I was going to be dragging myself through the book. The description of the setting was beautiful and I did appreciate the writing style!
fuckthisshit's review
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.0
ihyuca's review
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
inspiring
lighthearted
mysterious
reflective
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
icoltman7036's review
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.75
cbbenton's review against another edition
emotional
hopeful
reflective
sad
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.75