21st Century Literature discussion

This is the place for discussion of the whole book, once you've finished it. Please don't read what's here unless you've finished or you don't care about spoilers.

If someone has any spoilers, I'd be happy to hear them, because I read the whole book and I couldn't spoil anything if I tried. I feel like there was a deep dark secret that I was supposed to intuit by subtext that I failed to intuit. Maybe based on the fact that the title, used by the narrator's friend, was also used by his father during the war, and from this I was supposed to conclude . . . ?

I felt like I was reading two stories -- the present and the flashback, and neither of them ended.

But, I probably missed something.

"What he taught me was to be reckless, taught me that if I let myself go, did not slow myself down by thinking so much beforehand I could achieve many things I would never have dreamt possible." This quote is taken from episode in the book in which the two boys venture out to "steal" horses. But it seems that throughout the book there is a tension between recklessness and prudence, with the the fatal outcome from a moment's carelessness with a gun serving as a stark counterpoint to the quote above. In any case, the author repeatedly denies the hand of fate, and puts the responsibility for outcomes solely on his characters. Any further thoughts on this?

Good thought, Karen. For me the quote almost seems at odds with the way he lives and tells his story now, but perhaps the tension has a link to the tension between the two timelines? His younger self does many more reckless things than his older self. How else do you feel he's changed between the days of his youth and the older man he becomes?

I loved the book. I thought the writing was beautiful. I could not imagine living a life of solitude before reading this book, but now...I did read the book the first time many years ago, so maybe my oen aging has brought me to the idea that solitude could be appreciated.

Anita, that's a beautiful thought. I felt that growing old and growing into one's age was a theme of the novel. What was it about the way the solitude was presented that made it more appealing to you?

Am copying this comment from the opening discussion:

I just discovered that there is a timeline of the events of the novel on its Wiki page. I don't recommend seeking that out before reading the novel, but I am definitely going to use it when/if I get a chance to revisit the novel. Probably not a spoiler, in terms of revealing plot, but will be cautious: (view spoiler)[Part of the power of the novel for me was the impact of the past on the present. A more European than American theme? (hide spoiler)]

I agree that, yes, fate and responsibility weigh heavily on Trond. On page 1, he wonders what the titmice want of him; I associate that with his confusion of what his daughter wants of him. There's a moment when he's both frightened and excited by his own efficacy. Tellingly, for me, is that the author couples this realization with separation from his heroic father.

I see two prominant things happening here. One is Trond pulling together private experiences to make a tapestry of his personal life, and another weaving between individuals to make a whole society. So, his father was a hero to him and also to the resistance; Jon was a hero to his brothers, but failed them; and Trond in the end accepts that he is necessary to his daughter even if he fails. Over and under these parts is, of course, an end-of-life meditation.


This is so damn tight. And there's a privacy to it. The more I look (this is my third reading), the more I find.

"When they came to the little bridge, Lars Haug stopped and waved his torch.
'Thank you for the company,' he said through the darkness." -- page 13

On the last page, we have his memory of walking arm in arm down the street with his mother. So, I bring those two moments together and I think what a fine, fine epitaph that would make for anyone: Thank you for the company.

(It makes a difference that since my first reading, I've read McGuane's New York Times review and an NPR interview with the author, that I'm about the same age and also miss my family. Which, by my reading, is more than fine: Trond is "reading" both himself and the people in his life, and I expect an author to bring authentic, lived experience into the work.)

Why do I say there's a privacy to it? The narrator says what he needs to say, but I always sense that he's not defending or explaining to anyone but himself. He even seems to be talking to himself about his reflections as he goes along. "I cannot rule that out." "It's not that important." "I give myself that liberty..."


On this reading, being more familiar with it now, I'm trying to separate the strands in order to look at each more clearly. (1)Lars' story -- we're given only the highlights -- prompts Trond from start to finish. (2) Not just horses, but also dogs, deer, birds, nettles, trees, the river, snow and sun and cold and heat. I link that up with the various passions he experiences and contemplates. Without this setting, the sheer physical aliveness would be sadly missing.

I greatly appreciate that Trond sees in others what he cannot see in himself: his concern about Lars being alone in chapter 1, and on page 218 we get "My father look almost happy then, and I could see by the way he looked at me that I did too."

That wiki time-line is a time-saver, Lily.

You may be right about European sensibilities re memory and time. From what I've read (in philosophy, mostly years ago), European thought is less analytic, more synthetic.

I've noticed for myself that re-remembering events changes their meaning and that new experiences cast a different light on old experiences. Seems there's no end to that.

"The narrator says what he needs to say, but I always sense that he's not defending or explaining to anyone but himself. He even seems to be talking to himself about his reflections as he goes along."

This.

And. Something about the honesty in this kind of reflection. The lack of need to justify, combined with the openness to each new strand, each observation, that occurs to him (occurs sounds too sudden -- germinates? flowers?). There's a beauty in the way his perceptions seem to be in tune with nature. This outlook resonates with the surroundings, makes him seem closer to the world. As you say, the physical setting brings out an aliveness. In the way he experiences it, the way he expresses it.

Thank you for your reflections, Lacewing, they've made me think more deeply about my own and the book.

You're most welcome, Terry.

I've had another thought about how he's talking to himself. On my first reading, I wondered if he felt his father's presence. Now I wonder if it's his sister, who knew him all his life, with whom his relationship was less fraught, and was the last to die before he secluded himself.

Re your comment above about "growing into" his age. Wow. Nice conjunction of phrases. My feelings from the first few pages since my first reading have been that he is willingly, knowingly, acceptingly doing so.(or maybe compulsively without knowing why?) Only on this reading do I see what it means when Jon destroys the bird eggs: he was, in effect, pushing himself into a full realization of what it meant for one of his brothers to kill the other due to his own carelessness. Similar kind of experience, compulsion, realization.

Lacewing wrote: "The narrator says what he needs to say, but I always sense that he's not defending or explaining to anyone but himself...."

Yes!

Lacewing wrote: "Only on this reading do I see what it means when Jon destroys the bird eggs: he was, in effect, pushing himself into a full realization of what it meant for one of his brothers to kill the other due to his own carelessness...."

Thanks for pointing that out Lacewing! This was one event in the book that remained unexplained to me, but your comment makes perfect sense and seems quite obvious now.

(It's very cool to push myself and then get feedback letting me know I haven't gone too far. "Thank you for the company.")

Can we figure out who was a Nazi sympathizer, who helped persecuted to escape, who stayed within the bounds of neutrality, who protected whom and how (knowing how to get across the border to Sweden?), who betrayed whom, and in each case, if anyone? Where are Trond's resolutions real and where are they protective or self-deceptive stories? Is such an inevitable aftermath for some of years lived in Norway while a war raged of the type that did? (I am reminded of passages from Stieg Larsson or Mikael Niemi.)

This is another aspect that confused/ concerned me. It seems like Trond's dad, Jon's mom, and Franz and the major anti-Nazi forces, while Jon's dad is engaging in wilful blindness. I get this part. Then, there is the incident where Jon's father doesn't sweep away the footprints and the Nazis suspect what is up, and race down toward Jon's mother and the refugee. Franz is on the case and blows up the bridge, injuring some Nazis, and allowing Jon's mother to escape.

And then . . . what? No Nazi follow-up? No collective punishment? No homes get blown up? No one is arrested or stopped for questioning? These no indication that there are any physical repercussions from this event for anybody beyond the refugee (Jew, I assume?) who is shot and killed from across the river.

It's one thing to not know "what ever happened to Jon's father after he fell down and broke a bone." It's another thing to wonder why the Nazis just seem to have let a "terrorist" incident by half a town in Norway go unpunished.

"Even the title, 'Out Stealing Horses,' serves as both the announcement of an adolescent prank and a password for the dangerous activity of the resistance. A fairly short novel with a timescape of half a century that seems to have left out nothing important is a bit of a miracle. I can’t see how exegetes, excited by unpacking fraught outcomes, can pry this one apart. As Dostoyevsky remarked, 'Twice two makes four seems to me simply a piece of insolence.'"

From Thomas McGuane's NYT review in 2007:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/24/boo...

Just went review browsing:

Has a fair amount on other Norwegian writers -- including some linkages to Per Petterson's work:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2005...

A viewpoint from Patrick Ness at The Telegraph that some might find insightful, others frustrating:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/bo...

Has a list of reviews; haven't been through all of these yet:

http://www.complete-review.com/review...

A reviewer's comment on the "and's":

"Much of Petterson's worldwide success with Out Stealing Horses depends on two qualities: a deceptively simple, wonderfully incantatory style in which small units of well-observed detail and action, connected only by a string of "and"s, accumulate in long rhythmic sentences that frequently give us the impression that the next detail will be very bad news. We are kept spellbound and anxious." - Tim Parks, The New York Review of Books

I'm struck by the contrast between the reckless vivacity of the father and the young Trond with the introverted, constricted life of Trond as an older man. As if he could prevent further suffering.

Terry, what a good question. Perhaps the answer is that as I've aged and seen others in the generation above mine, I have come to realize how "alone" we are in life as we age. When I say that, I mean compared to the daily bombarding of stimuli we get when we raise children, work outside the home, etc. It isn’t that we’re not needed by others or that we don’t need others, but we change, which I believe is natural. And so many of those around us who kept us company are gone. While Trond felt nature was his “company,” I admit I need a book, but I love the solitude (and mental stimuli) a book brings me.

The book has some recurring motifs and phrases. One is the title. Another is the final line (first included earlier on): "You decide for yourself when it will hurt."

Does this statement refer to more than just the specific pages it appears? How does this sentiment infuse the novel? Does it resonate for you in relation to your own experiences?

Anita, I too feel as if I'm slowly growing into my age. I'm enjoying not fighting it. Some phrases we say until we lose their meaning, but the 'grace' in 'growing old gracefully' bears meditating on, in my opinion, and this book is a meditation of its own. Even though Trond, like most of us, has all sorts of unresolved issues from his life and past that occupy his mind, he also manages to settle into his changed place in the world, to fit and to find a synchronisation.

For me it, as a meditation, it speaks of fitting into a wider rhythm of life -- and death -- of not struggling to string things out or to cling to past vigour, and of accepting that we will one day be gone, not wasting breath fighting against it, but being here, now, while we still are.

It reminds me of another Norwegian writer, Karl Ove Knausgaard, who begins his 'My Struggle' series with the line: "For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops."

In reading the New Yorker review of Petterson's later works, I was struck by this sentence:

"Readers who know only Petterson’s most successful (also more straightforward and less interesting) novel, “Out Stealing Horses,” which won many prizes when it appeared in English translation, in 2005, might be surprised to encounter these run-on sentences, tripping over their own dropped clauses, pricked with intermittence, properly punctuated but curiously unpunctual."

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/201...

It doesn't just annoy me here. IT GET'S WORSE!

Karen, I'm interested in what you say about constrictedness. I can feel a certain truth to that, but I do also feel that he has a certain accepting nature in his older self. Do you feel a tension between these two things?

Lily, thanks for the links. I think I see what's being said there as a marriage of form and content with the long sentences. They are part of what they describe, of it as well as about it. Of this certain slowness, asking you to tarry a moment with them as his surroundings do.

I sense both acceptance and constriction. His is the acceptance of a wounded animal which goes far away to nurse itself and heal. Grief is central to him, yet he is in some denial of his own grief (witness the episode with the tears). Turning away from human company, even from that of his own daughter, he turns to the stark beauty of nature and the orderliness of doing with his hands. Indeed he is trying to be the one who decides when it hurts, and how much.

The book has some recurring motifs and phrases. One is the title. Another is the final line (first included earlier on): "You decide for yourself when it will hurt."

The first use of this line is Jon saying it just as he is beginning to have his mental breakdown and leading Trond to where he will crush the bird egg and will never be seen again. (The title is also used by Jon before it is given a "good" re-meaning later on.) It is interesting that these two tropes you mentioned, which by the end appear to be positive, are negatively subverted by the author/ Jon before they gain their positive connotations.

Unless the last line is supposed to be a negative indication that Trond was having the same mental break that Jon had had earlier, which would actually explain a little why old-Trond is so much different from young-Trond.

I think Trond spend his whole life postponing when it would hurt. And now after the death of the two people he loved most and was closest to, his sister and wife, he knew he would no longer be able to postpone his long buried hurt of his father's disappearance from his life. It takes a lot of energy to grieve, just as it takes some real mental fortitude to keep the pain at bay. He just wasn't strong enough anymore. I think that is why Trond chose solitude among nature as the place he would finally face some of his pain. A place he could rest and reflect but at the same time stay busy and focussed on the home repairs his cottage would require. When he saw Lars it just forced that pain to the surface, quickly, and kind of unbalanced him mentally and physically. But I think he was finally able to see he could face what happened that summer so many years ago and perhaps even have some empathy towards his father.

Or lol, basically what Karen said!

Sandra, Karen, great insight. Well put. You've made me understand the ending better... In fact, the whole book. I had that general idea, I think, but hadn't put it in exactly those terms. So yes, it is a positive way at the end, I think.

Ellen talks about the opening lines of David Copperfield (pg. 197). How do you understand the phenomenon she's describing, of not being "the leading characters of our own lives"? Has this happened to anyone you know? Do you think it has happened to Trond?  Is it a good or a bad thing?

I’ve finally had a chance to sit and read through this discussion and add a few of my own thoughts, which will unavoidably have a bit of a “me too” aspect, given the excellent discussion which has already occurred.

I agree that Karen’s summary said things well (message 27). The one thing I read differently was Trond’s choice to end up where he did. I think he chose it more for the isolation than for the stark beauty. That it resembles the place he spent his summers with his father, the last place he had a largely untainted happiness and innocence, is no accident either. He does value orderliness, with his insistence on always dressing for dinner and his horror of becoming “the man with the frayed jacket and unfastened flies standing at the Co-op counter with egg on his shirt…” This orderliness strikes me as more of the armor he employs against emotional truths. (He reminds me of Colin Firth’s character in “A Single Man”, for anyone who’s seen that film).

The writing reminds me in a way of Faulkner, with long sentences and drawn out descriptions of place, while the most important occurrences go by with barely a mention. I think the heart of Trond’s despair is captured in the simple statement about his father’s letter: “No special greeting to me. I don’t know. I really thought I had earned one.” I think this also relates to the reference to David Copperfield and being the hero of one’s own life. Trond naturally assumed a special bond between himself and his father, given their summers together, especially the final one. Then he finds out that in the end he and the rest of his family merit no more than a “thanks for the good times” dismissal.

I think this post is long enough, more later. But I’ll put the question out there, what do people think motivated Trond to put his arm around Jon’s mother while Jon’s and Trond’s fathers were engaged in their one-upmanship?

Whitney wrote: "...But I’ll put the question out there, what do people think motivated Trond to put his arm around Jon’s mother while Jon’s and Trond’s fathers were engaged in their one-upmanship? ..."

Good question. Is there something protective in his nature that comes through about Trond? I have a sense of that, right down to his choice (conscious or unconscious) to not question Lars -- and in the scenes with his daughter. Didn't we sense it in the final scene with his own mother, too?

Matthew quotes,

"'All this is strong material for drama—effectively rendered scenes that you'd expect would build on each other—but Petterson oddly chooses to keep them disconnected, as remembered fragments. ...The physics of cause and effect—what gives a novel momentum—hardly comes into play.'"

Oddly, I see cause and effect as central. Or rather, the tension in characters between inescapable effects an those over which they have some degree of agency. And look at the message there: "You decide when it hurts." Such wry humor in that. Not if it will hurt, that being a given. Rather fate has granted a small concession to the strong and self-disciplined. The wise accept the lopsided bargain, as Trond has learned to do.

The self-discipline of restraining himself from inquiring about his father allows him a measure of resolution. He will let it go. Interestingly, there is a counterpoint incident to this. His father's disastrous logging decision came of a lack of discipline. -- an unwillingness to wait a little longer for what he wanted, and an unwillingness to choose temporary pain.

Good observations Karen. I like the given, that it will hurt.

For me the arm was one reached out from the child world into the adult, something that said he was not naive, that he was not unaware. It was clumsy, and I'm not sure even he would have seen it that way exactly, but it smacked of rocking the boat, to show that he knew there was something to rock.

And a challenge to the old family order of his childhood and the supremacy of his father.