Claim Now Out Stealing Horses Designed And Illustrated By Per Petterson Readily Available As PDF

in the hell just happened here What in the hell

I am completely flummoxed by my own reaction to this book.


So, quick back story on this, . . Aboutyears ago, I was hiding out in the kitchen at a neighbor's New Year's Eve party, My husband had become trapped against the wall in the den, stuck in a conversation with several other men, forced to listen to a man give the playbyplay on how he had just tiled his floors.
I saw that I couldn't save my spouse, so I had slipped into the kitchen unseen and quickly discovered the best bottle of Pinot Noir I've ever had in my life.
Moments later, another woman entered the kitchen with a declaration of “Bloody hell!” so I poured her a glass of the precious wine.
Naturally, she took a seat,

When I asked her the question that I ask of all normalappearing strangers, “What are your topbooks of all time” she surprised me by answering, “I have only one book that I remember, Out Stealing Horses.
It's like the best book I've ever read in my life, ”

Out Stealing Horses Turns out it's a book written by a Norwegian author, translated nicely into English, and I recently found a copy at a thrift store.


So, I started reading the book this week, and I was almost cursing the woman from the kitchen, What in the hell The beginning like almost the entire first part was totally WEIRD, There is almost ZERO character development and the story is dominated by onedimensional male characters, Only three women appear in the entire novel, and they might as well be pet turtles or lizards, they are so woefully unformed.
I can't even say I EVER understood the protagonist or could predict what he would do in a particular scenario,

And, did I mention that dialogue is almost nonexistent and is comprised of mostly a whole lot of “Yeps” and “Nopes”

Oh, and may I add that it contains possibly the MOST awkward “nude scene” I've ever encountered Oh yes, there is a rain storm, and the grown father and the almost grown son strip off all of their clothes, lather up their bodies with soap and then perform handstands together in the rain.
For a while. I've never thought more about male genitalia than I did during this scene, Personally, I've come to think of it as a “torture scene, ”

And let me cap off this part of my review by telling you that many, MANY paragraphs are filled with very BORING descriptions of cutting down and hauling trees.


Soooo many things are wrong here, Soooo many “kisses of death” exist here for me as a reader,

And yet.

And yet,

despite all of these issues, this book contains some of the deepest, heartachingly beautiful descriptions of aging and longing and abandonment and joy and regrets.
I feel like I'd need to read it at least two more times to grasp what is really, really wonderful here,

It's a story of an aging man and his dog who is better written than almost all of the humans, and, in the end, it knocked me out.
KNOCKED ME OUT. And here I am, giving this weird book five, “That part of my life when I could turn the dreams to some use is behind me now, I am not going to change anything anymore, ”

Out Stealing Horses is a pure, poignant and luminous story that feels out of place in this modern and cluttered world.
It's a simple tale that doesn't do anything fancy, and had the feel of both being radiant like the sun high up in the sky and the echoing sadness of a dry riverbed.
Petterson effectively catches hold and haunts with the one thing we all ponder on from time to time, the knowledge of just how fragile life can be.


Trond Sander is ayear old man who has relocated to rural Norway with just his dog Lyra, to live out a simple life away from the rest of civilization.
He is lonely and withdrawn,
and seemingly the dark trees from the isolated forest close by are his only friends, But it appears he is perfectly content with his sparse existence, with only painful and bittersweet memories to keep him company at night.
His wife's face, only three years buried is starting to disappear, but after a stranger approaches one day, for Trond, the year ofis brought back to life with vivid clarity, as if it happened yesterday.
He realizes that the stranger, is someone from his childhood, Lars, the brother of his once good friend Jon, This is the catalyst for the extended voyage Trond embarks on in his mind, as it's memory that comprises the bulk of the story.


In an inspired move, Petterson emphasizes Tronds alienation from the surrounding world through repeated references to film, Though an avid reader in the present, Trond spent his childhood watching movies, and so in a temporally counterintuitive conceit, the great books of the past fill his present and references to film evoke his past.
It is fitting that Trond, living as a recluse, intentionally having cordoned himself off from the great mass of humanity, should find greater solace in the words of dead men than in the most pervasive art form of the present day.
The world, as he knows it today, means nothing,

The melancholy aroused by Tronds memories stems not only from his fathers disappearance after the second world war, but from the calamity of carefree childhood games, a tragic accident that altered his youth, and an incident involving his father and Jon's mother by the river.
And petterson utilizes nature and the landscapes with a such a sharp eye similar to that of Cormac McCarthy, The prose is on the whole breathtaking, With only childhood memories to sift through, Trond can barely begin to appreciate who his father was and why he abandoned his family.
The resulting resentment, simmering yet unarticulated, hangs over Tronds life, and in the greatest tragedy in a novel filled with them, infects his relationships with his own children, who he is not bothered about, as Petterson achingly portrays with a second intrusion into Tronds solitary life, when one of his daughters turns up out of the blue.


For a novel so focused on childhood memories, Out Stealing Horses admirably avoids sentimentality, The pleasant moments from Tronds past, generally spent in the company of his father, are always depicted with an appropriately restrained degree of mirth and yearning.
And to a degree his feeling for Jon's mother invaded and imbalanced his purist thoughts, Likewise, even when describing the death of a young child, Petterson eschews excessive emotion and relates both the incident and its aftermath with steely calm.
And quite clearly apart from horse riding which adds a gallop, and one tense moment involving an explosion, there is a blanket of calmness within.
The narrative never gets out of first gear, but then it doesn't need to, and all the better for it,

Having grappled with the mysteries of his youth, whilst stuck in a lackluster present, I was glad to see the final closing pages remain with Trond's childhood, a day out with his mother, which could have turned out to be one of his happiest.
The novel works so well as a tragic account of a disrupted childhood, a haunting illustration of both the liberating and paralyzing effects of memory, and, yet, at times could even be seen as a semiengaging adventure story, simply because of the vast open
landscapes of it's setting.


This was my first outing in the company of Petterson, more will certainly follow, Felt like taking of a blindfold and staring across the fjord, at it's simplistic beauty and beholding power, .