Ugh, I don’t think I’m going to hit 2 1/2 Cannonballs this year, and it will be Mark Leyner and his Sugar Frosted Nutsack that I will curse if I don’t (still slogging through that one). The delightful little Out Stealing Horses, however, is utterly blameless. It took me an evening to read, with its terse narration and quick plot. A nice way to spend an evening.
I picked up Out Stealing Horses at Half Price Books because 1) it was $1 and 2) I like horses. It turns out it won a bunch of awards about 10 years ago. I don’t know that I thought it was so spectacular, but I enjoyed it. It’s a story about a 67 year old man named Trond who has retired into the backwoods of Norway. He’s perfectly happy to spend his days working on his cabin and playing with his dog. One day, he meets his neighborhood and recognizes him from his childhood. From there, the rest of the story is told in flashbacks as Trond reminisces about a summer when he was a teenager and his whole world changed.
“You decide for yourself when it will hurt.”
The story moves around a lot: present day in Norway, flashing back to the beginning of that summer, then the end, then he gradually fills in the middle as we watch him in present day. It would have been confusing, except that Petterson’s writing (well, the translation of it) is very straightforward and easy to follow. Not that it’s dull or ugly–he describes the woods beautifully, as well as the characters. It’s just not unnecessarily flowery, and in a novel where tense changes are often the only alert to a flash back, I appreciated it.
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