Short takes — Out Stealing Horses

It is difficult to be young, to see the world and to not have the tools yet to recognize it.

In Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses, a young man named Trond retreats with his father to a cabin by a river in the woods. Trond has a friend there, a young man named Jon who will be removed from Trond’s life by a tragedy for which Jon is neither entirely blameless nor entirely to blame.

Later, as Trond and his father and Jon’s father and mother clear trees and prepare to float them down the river to a mill in Sweden, we learn slowly that Trond’s father and Jon’s father have a past which comes to bear as each of their families disintegrate and reform.

We learn, as we read, that this is all the past.

It is difficult to be old, to recognize the world and to have learned that to recognize is not the same as to understand.

In Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses, an old man named Trond retreats to a cabin in the woods that is much like his father’s cabin. Trond has married and had children of his own who are long since grown. He has married again and lost his wife in a car accident that nearly killed Trond as well. Trond intends to spend his remaining years quietly, measuring and solving the small problems of life alone.

Trond seeks to be present, but as we get older, it is more difficult to determine what being present means. The past is more insistent in its intrusions, and those intrusions can even take the shape of people we love or have loved, and sometimes the bonds we share with people who know the people we have loved can surprise us in their unsought potency.

It is possible for a desire to be present to be born from a drive to absent one’s self from the past.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about how to be present, and there have been times where existence alone, or nearly alone, in seclusion with a fine dog (by which I mean nearly any dog) has seemed to be nearly a Platonic ideal. Out Stealing Horses is a rich record of that kind of life, but it is also, and this is what makes the book not just fine but extraordinary, a quiet, beautiful record how even in such seclusion we can escape neither our messy, vulnerable hearts, nor the past that wounded and shaped them.

This piece was originally published in the Unwinnable publication “Exploits” on August 1, 2019.