Good fiction entertains. Great fiction enlightens. While the decision about “Out Stealing Horses,” by Per Petterson, will be left up to critics, professors of literature and the ages, today’s readers can choose either reason to pick up this winner of the largest literary prize in the English-speaking world, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
Perhaps this was an unexpected selection by the judges, for originally, the book appeared in Norwegian in 2003, then was translated in 2005. It appeared in the United States only this year.
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.
Ostensibly seeking peace three years after his wife’s death, but in fact trying to make sense of the path his life has taken since his father’s abandonment several years after World War II, Trond mixes memory and a tentative, unwilling acquaintance with Lars, his sole neighbor, as he begins an isolated winter in his cabin.
While the book gives an account of a man deliberately secluded from the relentless turmoil of politics, the demands of family and friends, the business of making a living, Trond’s mind does not escape. Nor does he try to, for he dips again and again into the storeroom of his past, lingering over visions and sensations, struggling to solve the riddles that always define and confine people’s interactions.
Trond’s perceptions roam among his current life; revelations about his father’s resistance activities during World War II; and his relationship with his father during the summer when Trond was 15 and went out stealing horses with a friend. His growth as he approached adulthood weathered several tragedies, and we both wonder and hope that his movement into old age sounds an affirmation that he finally makes peace with the vagaries of human existence.
Dare I brand “Out Stealing Horses” a man’s novel? (Certainly reviewers and publishers have had no difficulty slapping the opposite label on works written by women or whose protagonists are women.) This book is that, in much the way that Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam War novel, “The Things They Carried,” is a man’s book.
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.
Women will want to read the book, too, for the same reason that very masculine men attract female attention. Trond is proof that the silent, brooding, strong man is still very much with us and can conceal a thoughtful, sensitive, perceptive inner life.
As a nation, the American reading public is insular in its attitude toward non-American writers. We pretty much assume that anything interesting in print must be by a U.S. author. As an economic system, our publishers are obsessed with big best sellers. They pretty much assume a book must bring in mega-money.
Can an unabashedly literary novel disguised as a “good read” buck these trends? We are fortunate that tiny Graywolf Press, an independent nonprofit publisher in St. Paul, Minn., believes so. So do a slew of other supporters from the philanthropic community, which underwrote the translation by Anne Born (she shared the IMPAC prize with Petterson).
The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award is the largest and most international prize of its kind. Nominations of books with “high literary merit” are made by libraries in major cities around the world, and books may be written in any language, although they must be translated into English.
Petterson was born in 1952 and was a librarian and bookseller before he published his first work, a volume of short stories, in 1987. Since then he has written three novels.
Bonnie McCune is a Denver freelance writer who works for the Colorado State Library.
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Fiction
Out Stealing Horses, by Per Petterson, translated from Norwegian by Anne Born, $22
