Through a Glass Darkly

Books | Review of: Out Stealing Horses,

By BENJAMIN LYTAL
June 20, 2007

"Out Stealing Horses," (Graywolf, 258 pages, $22) Per Petterson's new masterpiece of tough romance begins with an old man, Trond Sander, who has moved out to the Norwegian countryside to make his final home. He has to compromise his solitude in order to survive, and he willingly goes to help an aged neighbor who, in the middle of the night, seems to have lost his dog.

Standing in the darkness, Trond introduces us to his brand of bodily wisdom:

Nothing can challenge the lightness and freedom of the body; height unconfined, distance unlimited, for these are not the properties of darkness. It is only an immeasurable space to move about inside.

Apparently stimulated by this surreal adventure — the neighbor, Lars, tells a story about shooting a dog, and then his own dog appears, back from the darkness — Trond returns to his bed to dream. The novel then travels back in time to 1948, when Trond and his father spent the summer in a similar country setting.

The countryside of 1948 remains a land of physical labor, with horses and rowboats as the chief means of transport. Young Trond's initial adventures, with a boy named Jon, have the creepy certainty of folktales: After a stolen ride on the local landowner's horses, Jon takes Trond up a tall spruce, and near the top shows him a beautiful bird's nest. To Trond's horror, Jon crushes an egg in his hands: "Jon's face was a chalk-white mask with an open mouth, and from that mouth came sounds that made my blood run cold." Jon clambers down and runs off, and when Trond finally descends, he looks back up to see "the tops of the spruces sway and whip against each other," evoking a cleansing, animistic imagination.

After this, Trond's father becomes the focus. "Do you want to know what they're all talking about at the shop?" he asks Trond. His relation of events — one of Jon's younger brothers, Lars, accidentally killed the other, Odd, and the fault is Jon's — brings a new tone to the novel. The father's middle-aged voice changes Mr. Petterson's novel, from one of childhood or old age to one of mature human relations. Trond's father, interacting with other adults, including Jon's mother, quickly emerges as a sexual being.

Meanwhile, back in the frame story, the 67-year-old Trond realizes that his neighbor is the same Lars that killed his twin brother all those years ago. But he suppresses this fact, and goes about the practical business of driving his Volvo to the co-op, sharpening his Jonsered chainsaw, and thinking about Dickens novels.

In the next chapter, Trond's father has brought together his neighbors to fell a small grove of spruce trees. The work is rash — at this season, the trees are dangerously full of sap, and after a brief flash of insouciance in which Mr. Petterson has his characters cursing and joking, tragedy strikes. Trond has been flirting with Jon's mother, a distraction which causes Jon's father to drop a log and break his leg.

Now the negative space around Trond's late-life hermitage becomes meaningful. Though he calls himself a lucky man, "the boy with the golden trousers," he clearly suffers from indirect guilt. The fateful summer of 1948 haunts him: His best friend went haywire, then he developed a crush on that friend's mom, and the friend's dad is crippled because of it. Remembering all this, Trond endures what seems to be a mild stroke. He also discovers that his father must have been in love with Jon's mother. Sexual awareness goes hand in hand with guilt, and here plot summary breaks down. The way Mr. Petterson keeps his themes, in 250 pages, from becoming too claustrophobic, owes much to his handling of Trond's character. Although a distinctive personality — reticent, formal, fair-minded — Trond burns with a low flame, barely illuminating the architecture that, were it visible, would show this novel to be nautilus-shaped, beautiful but simple. The resonances between 1948 and the present remain soft, so it is pleasing to catch them.

"Out Stealing Horses" will interest fans of Rick Bass, J.M. Coetzee, and even Marilynne Robinson — Mr. Patterson has something like her talent for scene setting and chronological collage, and all of the writers above have mastered a kind of tempered, minor-key retrospection. "Out Stealing Horses" is one of my favorite two or three new novels to appear this year.

blytal@nysun.com