A fairly short novel with a timescape of half a century that seems to have left out nothing important is a bit of a miracle. I can’t see how exegetes, excited by unpacking fraught outcomes, can pry this one apart … Among the agreeable surprises of Per Petterson’s novel is the misleading suggestion that the modesty of his narrator’s voice foretells a tale of minor events, an account of the sort of photorealism that prevents anything from ever happening. In fact, the book contains some bold, convincingly stated coincidences well outside the range of our highbrow realists … The unsentimentalized remoteness of Trond’s place produces a vital tranquility.
Both Out Stealing Horses and To Siberia are essentially about betrayals of trust. In both novels a young person on the brink of adulthood loses, in melodramatic circumstances, the one relationship that made it possible to face an inclement world with confidence. Narrated in hindsight by elderly survivors, the novels hint at a crippled adult life only half-lived in constant apprehension and prolonged mourning. A quiet stoicism holds panic and despair at bay … Much of Petterson’s worldwide success with Out Stealing Horses depends on two qualities: a deceptively simple, wonderfully incantatory style in which small units of well-observed detail and action, connected only by a string of ‘and’s, accumulate in long rhythmic sentences that frequently give us the impression that the next detail will be very bad news. We are kept spellbound and anxious … Anne Born has been able to render Petterson’s Norwegian in a syntactically simple, hypnotically fluent English.
Trond, a 67-year-old man, has retired to a remote corner of eastern Norway, where the barren landscape comforts him after the death of his wife. The countryside idyll is destroyed, however, by the unexpected arrival of a man who knows something Trond would rather forget … Out Stealing Horses is tinged with an autumnal sense of loss and the self-examination of an old man looking back on his life. Beckett's Malone Dies is a clear influence, but Petterson is triumphantly his own man. This book is a minor masterpiece of death and delusion in a Nordic land.
It is a novel with a distinctly Scandinavian tone: Trond, a 67-year-old widower, has moved into a remote house on a lake. He wants nothing more than to be left alone to look back on his life ... There is scant talk and much mystery, giving the 67-year-old narrator a lot to ponder.
The novel’s plot, like its language and style, is deceptively straightforward; its setting, the rustic, unpopulated countryside in eastern Norway, is elementary and natural; its narrator, 67-year- old Trond, is as uncomplicated as the antithesis to a homicidal maniac or smooth-talking romantic alpha-male can be … Violence, action, tussles with the elements and personal challenges mark the pages, yet we are not learning about a Hemingway-esque hero or even an anti-hero, but rather an ordinary male who also happens to be wonderfully human.
Trond Sander, the 67-year-old Norwegian narrator of Per Petterson's intimate and lyrical novel, is a combination of Henry David Thoreau and Samuel Beckett … The rugged beauty of Norway is every bit as alive and expressive in Petterson's story as Sander himself. Sander obsessively remembers a single summer, 50 years in the past, spent with his father and filled with events that have haunted him ever since … Petterson's narrative takes its time, and much of the prose, especially describing the Norwegian landscape and the hard labor of living in it, is hypnotic and grimly detailed.
Petterson renders the meditations of Trond Sander, a man nearing 70, dwelling in self-imposed exile at the eastern edge of Norway in a primitive cabin. Trond's peaceful existence is interrupted by a meeting with his only neighbor, who seems familiar … Petterson coaxes out of Trond's reticent, deliberate narration a story as vast as the Norwegian tundra.
Trond has returned to the rustic region after a devastating car accident that killed his wife and left him gravely injured, hoping to live out the rest of his days quietly, with his dog as his only companion. But late one night, he has a chance encounter with his only neighbor, an aging man named Lars ... Haunting, minimalist prose and expert pacing give this quiet story from Norway native Petterson an undeniably authoritative presence.
