Out Stealing days of my life, not Horses

Spoilers ahead!!!!   Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses was a well written book and a wonderfully translated work.  Unfortunately, like a lot of literature these days, it doesn’t go anywhere.  It seems to be building to some great revelation, some great moment, but what we get is a little moment before the characters limp off the stage.  To say I was disappointed is an understatement.  

The story follows Trond, a elderly man who settles in rural Norway to live out his life.  He meets an old family friend in the country and this triggers a series of memories that we dip into and out of throughout the story.  This is definitely non-linear storytelling.  In a book like this, it becomes more important to have some theme connecting these memories, but these recollections are ultimately just that, memories of an old man.  They are interesting and take us interesting places (Nazi occupation of Norway, helping people escape the occupation into Sweden, Trond’s father leaving his family during the war, his childhood friend making a huge mistake with a loaded gun) but they don’t ultimately tell us much about Trond and why he is who he is.  It’s almost like he is a spectator in his own life.  

His daughter comes to visit him at one point.  We learn that he never told her where he was moving to after his wife and her mother died (car accident).  I wondered and hoped that her visit might pull him out of his funk and lead him back to life, but we don’t know if that happens.  The last part of the book deals with how Trond makes a connection with his father by helping him to ferry some logs down the river.  This connection with his father seems important and I thought the book would pivot on this point.  But what follows is incredibly disappointing and involves his father leaving the family for good. What he leaves for Trond and his mother in Sweden and their reaction to it is how the book ends.  There is no return to the present to explain how this is important to the elderly Trond or how he changed because of it.  The reader is just left hanging.  I would have been less disappointed if the entire book was just mediocre, but the writing is wonderful.  There is no payoff for working through the life of this man.  Maybe that’s where modern literature has evolved to, but it is not satisfying for me.  I can imagine some good discussion coming out of it though. I know I would love to talk with someone else who has read it.  Maybe they would see something that I didn’t.