Out Stealing Horses: a Novel, by Per Petterson, translated by Anne Born (New York: Picador, 2008; first published in Norway in 2003)
Still mourning the death of his wife three years earlier, sixty-seven-year-old Trond Sander moves from the city to a remote cabin in the hopes of finding peace and solitude, but when his nearest neighbor turns out to be someone from his distant past, memories invade his escape. All the “turbulence, grief, and…overwhelming beauty of his youth,” during summers spent with his father in a remote, stunningly evoked, Eastern Norwegian landscape, engulf Sander and readers. Out Stealing Horses deserves all the awards and praise it’s received.
The sun was high in the sky now, it was hot under the trees, it smelt hot, and from everywhere in the forest around us there were sounds; of beating wings, of branches bending and twigs breaking, and the scream of a hwak and a hare’s last sigh, and the tiny muffled boom each time a bee hit a flower. I heard the ants crawling in the heather, and the path we followed rose with the hillside; I took deep breaths through my nose and thought that no matter how life should turn out and however far I traveled I would always remember this place as it was just now, and miss it. When I turned round I could see across the valley through a lattice of fir and pine, I saw the river winding and glittering below, I saw the red-tiled roof of Barkald’s sawmill further south by the river bank and several small farmsteads on the green patches beside the narrow band of water. I knew the families who lived in them and knew how many people there were in each house, and if I did not see our cottage on the far bank I could point out exactly behind which trees it lay, and I wondered if my father was still asleep, or if he was walking around looking for me and without worrying wondering where I had gone, whether I would come home soon, whether perhaps he should start making breakfast, and I could suddenly feel how hungry I was. – from Out Stealing Horses, by Per Petterson
Related Websites
Publisher’s Website
Per Petterson – Aschehoug Agency