Out Stealing Horses

Out Stealing Horses, by Norwegian author Per Petterson, was first published in 2003; the English-language translation by Anne Born was published in 2005. Told in the first person, the novel follows Trond Sander’s meditations on key events in his life and his acceptance of his advancing age and future death. Set in a remote forested area of eastern Norway, the novel moves back and forth in time between its present-tense setting in 1999 and Trond’s past, particularly the summer of 1948. It is in many ways a coming-of-age story, as Trond’s memories develop themes including the relationship between humans and nature, the importance of solitude for self-discovery, and the impacts of childhood experiences, memories, and history.

The Norwegian publication of the novel won the Norwegian Booksellers’ Prize, and Born’s English-language translation won the 2006 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the 2007 Dublin IMPAC Award, which comes with one of the largest cash prizes in the literary world. A movie adaptation of the novel was released in 2019.

This guide uses the 2019 Graywolf Press Paperback edition.

Content Warning: The source material depicts Nazi persecution of Jewish people and the accidental death of a child.

Plot Summary

Divided into three parts, the novel first explores Trond Sander’s memories of disturbing and fragmented events that occurred in the summer of 1948. It then explores the relationships between these events and culminates with their impact on Trond’s life. Part 1 of the novel begins in November 1999; Trond lives by himself in a dilapidated cabin in rural eastern Norway. His only companion is a dog named Lyra, whose breed he doesn’t know. He spent his working life in Oslo but has since retired, explaining, “All my life I have longed to be alone in a place like this” (7).

One night, Trond is awakened by noise in the woods; it is his nearest neighbor looking for his dog. The man introduces himself as Lars Haug, and Trond helps him locate the dog, Poker. Something about the meeting disturbs Trond, and when he returns to his cabin, he lapses into memories of the summer of 1948. He was 15 years old and spending the summer with his father in a similarly remote cabin on a river near the Swedish border.

Jon, who lived on a neighboring farm, was Trond’s good friend, and he would often wake Trond early in the morning to go “out stealing horses” (17), a playful code for attempting to ride the horses of the wealthiest landowner in the area, a man named Barkald. One morning, after attempting to ride Barkald’s horses, Jon took him to climb a nearby tree and showed him a nest of tiny bird’s eggs, which he crushed to dust before Trond’s eyes. Jon’s disturbing behavior is explained by what happened the day before: Jon left his gun unsecured after going out hunting hares, and his twin brothers, Lars and Odd, played with it. Lars shot and killed Odd.

Trond continues to be visited by memories of that summer. He and his father helped Barkald make hay in exchange for using one of his horses, which Trond’s father used for his own enterprise: felling a large spruce forest on his property in order to send the timber downriver for sale. Trond admired Jon’s pretty mother when she came to help with the felling and realized that his father looked at her in the same way. He remembers a particular incident that occurred while the timber was being cut and stacked. His father and Jon’s father seemed in competition with one another, and Jon’s father broke his leg and was taken away to the hospital, never to be seen by Trond again.

His memories prompt the sudden realization that his neighbor, Lars Haug, is the same Lars he knew when he was 15: Jon’s little brother who shot his twin. While Trond is outside chopping wood, Lars comes to the cabin, and Trond invites him in for dinner. Lars admits that he knows who Trond is; Trond does the same. Neither talks in depth about what this means, and they clean up in silence. Later, Trond recalls saying goodbye to his father at the bus stop at the end of the summer; it was the last time he ever saw him.

Trond has been married twice, and his second wife was killed in a car accident, which he survived. The loss of his wife drove him to sell his business and live the rest of his life fixing up a cabin in the woods. He recalls how his wife and sister had called him “the boy with the golden trousers” (122), and he repeatedly acknowledges that he has been lucky in his life.

In Part 2, Trond remembers learning more about why his father had been so drawn to this remote area—he was part of the Norwegian Resistance, a group that fought Nazi occupation during World War II by passing secret documents and aiding refugees across the border into Sweden. One morning, Trond awakened to find his father missing and visited his father’s friend Franz, who told him a story: Trond’s father had pretended to be a compliant Norwegian citizen while he and Jon’s mother smuggled secrets and people past the German soldiers; however, Jon’s father refused to participate. One morning, Jon’s father failed to cover footprints left in the snow by his wife and a man she was helping escape, allowing the Germans to pursue them as they rowed upriver toward Trond’s father’s cabin. Franz blew up the bridge across the river to slow their pursuit, but the soldiers shot across the river and killed the man. Jon’s mother and Trond’s father fled to Sweden together.

Lars helps Trond dispose of a fallen tree in his yard, and after Lars talks about his life after 1948, Trond wonders whether his own father is the “step-father” to whom Lars refers. Trond is visited by his estranged daughter, who scolds him for not telling his family where he was going or even having a phone so they could contact him. After she leaves, he recalls the final days of the summer of 1948, when he and his father took Barkald’s horses into Sweden and checked on the timber they sent downriver, finding much of it caught on the riverbank. Trond freed the timber, making his father happy.

Part 3 recalls the immediate aftermath of that summer, when Trond returned home with his father’s promise to follow as soon as his business was concluded. He visited the train station every day to wait for him, until in the fall a letter arrived explaining that his father would not be returning, but the money from the timber was in a bank account in Sweden. Because summer was a bad time for sending timber, there was very little money, and Trond’s mother used most of it to buy him a suit. The novel concludes with Trond’s memory of walking arm-in-arm with his mother, taking his father’s advice that he gets to decide when something will hurt him.