4 November 2025, Out Stealing Horses, Per Petterson, 2003
Out Stealing Horses, is an arresting title and an ambiguous one. Fifteen year old Trond and his enigmatic friend Jon are not stealing horses, merely riding them without permission; it’s a fine distinction. Such ambiguity flows through this novel set in Norway which moves between Trond’s adolescence in the 1940s and his isolated life as an old man living a remote Norwegian forest. In 1948, (the year of stealing horses), he is holidaying with his father in what will be the last months he will ever spend with his father. Although he does not know this, his father will leave him, his sister and his mother to live with Jon’s mother. And Jon, after ‘stealing’ the horses, leaves an unguarded, loaded shotgun, which in a fatal accident, his younger brother, Lars shoots and kills his own twin brother. In old age, living alone, Trond finds Lars is his nearest neighbour and the events of that summer of 1948 come back to the fore of his mind.
The narrative moves between these two parts of Trond’s life in a way that lays out the events of both but fails to really enlighten the reader – we think, intentionally. Ambiguity, enigma and loose ends are in abundance; there are no neat resolutions. Jon disappears from the story, his parents seem unperturbed by the death of their child, Trond’s mother generates no respect and can offer no security for Trond in the absence of his father, Trond and Lars when they meet again barely acknowledge the events of the summer of 1948, and Trond as an adult, as his father did to him, absents himself from his daughter’s life. Petterson’s prose has been described as ‘limpid’ and his story as ‘luminous’ and while we agreed that his style was clear and unfussy, as readers, we felt that by the end of the novel, there much left unknown and unresolved. Perhaps this novel is best captured as a study of benevolent alienation; lives lived with trauma, not unhappily but without deep connections, protectively, independently, sucessfully. Like the title it is an arresting notion.