A review by liberrydude
Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson

3.0

A very deceiving title and also rambling and strange novel. At times I was mesmerized by the descriptions of mood, time, and memory and other times the prose with run-on sentences was annoying. It's a story of two times: the present (circa 1998 or so) as a 67 year old man retires to the country to live in solitude with his dog; the other time is 1948 Norway when a young boy is in the country up by Trondheim near the Swedish border living with his dad and doing manly things in the forest and along the river. Trond, the principal character, we never really come to know. We think we know him but his entire life between these two benchmarks is not revealed. The title refers to an incident in which Trond and his friend try to "steal" a rich neighbor's horses. They were just going to joy ride the horses. Not much happens. Trond gets thrown into some bushes. But their lives take a turn shortly afterwards when Trond discovers his dad is having an affair with his friend's mom and his friend accidentally leaves a gun out in the house and one of his twin brothers kills the other twin. Now in 1998 Trond has returned to the country area where all the drama occurred and finds his neighbor is the surviving twin brother. So we go back and forth between the two times and it's not always easy to know when you've made the transition between the times. The reader is trying to discern the issues Trond has with his father who it turns out might have been a hero with the Norwegian resistance during World War II. Trond loved his dad but has also been abandoned by his dad. The story ends with Trond and his mom going to Sweden to get some money from the sale of floated timber that the absent father had sent them. I just thought it strange to end the story with the mother as the entire book had been about Trond and his dad. Still I enjoyed the book. It was different and had a Western (cowboy) feel to it. Reminded me of John Updike or Thomas McGuane.