A rugged landscape of emotions in the Norwegian wild

Out Stealing Horses
By Per Petterson
Translated, from the Norwegian, by Anne Born
Graywolf, 258 pp., $22

Trond Sander, the 67-year-old Norwegian narrator of Per Petterson's intimate and lyrical novel, is a combination of Henry David Thoreau and Samuel Beckett. Sander lives alone in a lakeside cabin, spending his days awash in the seasons, swimming in his personal sea of longing. Petterson interweaves Sander's past and present, while languorously exploring his sparse emotional landscape. After the recent death of his wife, Sander admits, "I lost interest in talking to people. . . . That is one reason for living here. Another reason is being close to the forest. It was a part of my life many years ago in a way that nothing later has been."

Indeed, the rugged beauty of Norway is every bit as alive and expressive in Petterson's story as Sander himself. Sander obsessively remembers a single summer, 50 years in the past, spent with his father and filled with events that have haunted him ever since. He was 15 then, but he has forgotten nothing, reliving those days of loss and regret. He recalls a forest walk with his friend Jon before Jon disappeared: "It was hot under the trees, it smelt hot, and from everywhere in the forest around us there were sounds; of beating wings, of branches bending and twigs breaking, and the scream of a hawk and a hare's last sigh."

Sander probes his past seeking to unravel a mystery, to understand why his father left for good, why Jon never returned after a terrible accident. His sense of resignation is an almost tactile thing. In his aging voice, we hear a Beckettian endurance: "I can't go on, I'll go on." Residing in the present, Sander chooses to live in the past. Recalling horse-riding with his father half a century before, he muses, "If I just concentrate I can walk into memory's store and find the right shelf with the right film and disappear into it and still feel in my body that ride through the forest with my father."

In "Out Stealing Horses," even the smallest gestures are fraught with meaning. After Sander has fallen off his horse, his father surprises him with a hug. "He had never done such a thing before . . . and it did not feel right. But I let him hold me while I wondered where I should put my hands, for I did not want to push him away, but neither could I hold my arms around him like he did around me, and so I just left them hanging in the air." Half a century later, Sander's adult daughter tracks down her hermit father, and we get another awkward hug: "She is hugging me so hard it's difficult to breathe, and I do not push her away, just go on holding my breath."

Per Petterson should not be confused with James Patterson. "Out Stealing Horses" reads nothing like a breathless roller-coaster ride of thrilling twists and turns. Much like a Raymond Carver short story, Petterson's narrative takes its time, and much of the prose, especially describing the Norwegian landscape and the hard labor of living in it, is hypnotic and grimly detailed. Perhaps the novel's most optimistic moment comes near the end, after Sander and his father have cut timber and sent it downriver. There's a logjam in the river, and the father nearly gives up hope. Sander dives into the current and loosens the logs, "and it was as if something broke, and the whole pile of timber tipped forwards. . . . My father looked almost happy then, and I could see by the way he looked at me that I did too."

Chuck Leddy is a freelance writer from Dorchester.