50 pages • 1 hour read
Per Petterson, Transl. Anne BornOut Stealing Horses
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2003A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Per Petterson’s Scandinavian Style
The Scandinavian landscape has famously lent itself to a minimalist aesthetic in design, cinema, and literature, and it is through this minimalist aesthetic that Per Petterson brings his characters’ inner conflicts to life. Small moments, gestures, and images have significant meaning and profound emotional depth. Characters who rely on action rather than words and who feel they are a part of the natural world create the dramatic tension. Because of this, the climax is an emotional shift rather than a dramatic confrontation, and the resolution lies in the philosophies or ideas the reader can take from the narrative.
Petterson’s writing also demonstrates poetic elements including lyricism, personification, and imagery that characterize Scandinavian literature. James Wood in The New Yorker wrote that “his sentences yearn to fly away into poetry” (Wood, James. “Late and Soon.” The New Yorker, 2 Dec. 2012). This is apparent from the first paragraph of Out Stealing Horses, when the narrator, Trond, observes, “There is a reddish light over the trees by the lake. It is starting to blow. I can see the shape of the wind on the water” (5). Petterson told The Guardian that he worked closely with translator Ann Born on the English version of the novel, ensuring that the style and rhythm matched his intent. The result is short sentences occasionally breaking up much longer ones that look closely at the natural world while following the narrator’s train of thought from present to past and back again (Campbell, James. “A Life in Writing: Per Petterson.” The Guardian, 2 Jan. 2009).
This connection to the natural world allows Petterson to use the wilderness to build understanding of his characters’ psyches, similar to how traditional fairy tales use the forest to represent the unconscious mind. He weaves together Trond’s memories and their physical settings to delve into the complexities of human psychology and emotion: The wildness of the weather and the landscapes mirror the internal conflicts characters face and the quiet way they explore their depth of meaning. Speaking to Tree of Life Review, Petterson commented, “What you say has less importance in your life compared to what you think. The words you say are also outnumbered by your thoughts” (Stocke, Joy E. “Language Within Silence—An Interview With Norwegian Writer Per Petterson.” Tree of Life Review). By structuring the novel around Trond’s thoughts and memories, Petterson builds a rich internal life for his protagonist, allowing readers to develop empathy and find parallels between their own search for meaning and Trond’s efforts to understand what his father was trying to communicate to him in the summer of 1948.
Historical Context: Norway and World War II
Germany invaded Norway early in World War II and maintained control of the country until its surrender to the Allies in 1945; in Out Stealing Horses, the consequences of this period are still directly affecting the characters in 1948. During the war years, Germany installed its own government in Norway that supported Nazi policies. As in other countries it occupied, German forces persecuted and executed Jewish citizens, leading many to attempt to flee the country for still-neutral Sweden. Many thousands of Norwegians organized to fight back through armed resistance, civil disobedience, active sabotage of Nazi equipment, and a network that moved messages and persecuted individuals across the border. Norwegians also created what was known as the “ice front,” pretending not to speak German and refusing to sit or walk near German soldiers in public; Petterson writes in Out Stealing Horses that the people “tried to act as if [the soldiers] did not exist, and what German the people had learned was suddenly forgotten” (142). In the novel, Trond’s central revelations about his father are related to these events: His father had earned the trust and camaraderie of the German soldiers by chatting with them about their lives in order to pass messages more easily into Sweden, and it was a thwarted effort to help a man across the border that sent his father and Jon’s mother into hiding together.
Trond’s story bears close connections to Petterson’s own experiences growing up during the post–World War II era, hearing stories about his mother’s memories and his uncle’s work as a Resistance fighter. However, Petterson has said he did not set out to write a novel about the war, only later realizing that the unease between Trond’s father and Jon’s father must have its roots in that period. Responding to critics who ask why he writes historical fiction, Petterson told The Guardian, “I say, they’re not historical, they’re contemporary, because people walking around who lived through this, even a little bit, they carry it inside. The contemporary isn’t just what you can see now” (Campbell, James. “A Life in Writing: Per Petterson.” The Guardian, 2 Jan. 2009). Trond’s memories reveal the continuing impacts of the occupation and his father’s resistance work, as the events of the war and the summer of 1948 forever altered the course of his life. At its core, Out Stealing Horses is an exploration of the way individuals are made of more than what can be seen on the surface, a distinction that Trond appreciates overtly when he observes that most people only “know about you […] not how what has happened to you and how all the decisions you have made have turned you into who you are” (73). For that, Petterson suggests, people must be willing to look more deeply into the past and the way it has shaped them.
