Visiting Norway with Out Stealing Horses

A few days ago, four fellow readers and I met at The Immigrant in the East Village for the second installment of the Vicarious Reading Book Club (now with a whopping 63 person waiting list!)

They drank wine, I downed my weight in Diet Coke, and we all shared our impressions of Out Stealing Horses, Per Petterson’s acclaimed 2003 novel set in the Norwegian woods. The book – which won by a hair in the runoff to be crowned February’s book club pick – turned out to be a controversial choice. Some loved its austere beauty and meditative tone. Others skewered its plodding pacing and compared it to stories told by grandparents that can take hours to get to the point. I fell somewhere in the middle.

Out Stealing Horses is the story of Trond, a man who sells his business in Oslo and retires to the woods without telling a soul, not even his two grown daughters. His isolation is a deliberate choice – one he’s clearly longed for and savors. In fact, he guards his privacy so carefully that he’s disturbed by even the most minor disruptions to his solitude, resenting the occasional appearances of neighbors and bemoaning necessary interactions with cashiers, mechanics, and others in his nearby town. Of those interactions, Petterson writes:

“People like it when you tell them things, in suitable portions, in a modest, intimate tone, and they think they know you, but they do not, they know about you, for what they are let in on are facts, not feelings, not what your opinion is about anything at all, not how what has happened to you and how all the decisions you have made have turned you into who you are. What they do is they fill in their own feelings and opinions and assumptions, and they compose a new life which has precious little to do with yours, and that lets you off the hook. No-one can touch you unless you yourself want them to. You only have to be polite and smile and keep paranoid thoughts at bay.”

In addition to sweating every social interaction he’s subjected to, Trond spends his days carefully restoring his old cottage, walking his dog Lyra, and slipping into the stream of old memories. Out Stealing Horses ping-pongs back and forth between Trond’s life as an aging man and his childhood summers spent at a cottage with his father. We read in equal measure about young Trond – exploring the woods with abandon, discovering his Dad’s secrets, and making formative friendships – and old Thoreau-like Trond – puttering about his kitchen, staring into space, and meticulously planning the rest of his lonesome life. What happened in the intervening 50 years is anyone’s guess, and those undiscussed years hang over the book like an unsolved mystery.

Though I'm an unabashed city person and relish living in a chaotic environment, I’m not immune to the romantic notion of stepping back into a simpler sort of existence. Like Marie Kondo or ASMR, Petterson’s book reads like a salve for modern life, an alternate reality of minimalism, quiet, order, and calm. But as the book progresses, that solitude begins to feel less like a triumph and more like a tragedy. On page one, Out Stealing Horses made me want to buy a tiny house deep in Connecticut. By page 200, it made me want to reach out and touch (or at least text) someone.

Below, I’ve pasted my discussion questions (some fresh from my brain, some stitched together from Goodreads and the publisher's guide), in case any of you feel inspired to pick this book up for yourselves:

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• This is a quiet, introspective, subtle book. What was the experience of reading this book like for you?
• Why do you think Trond moved out into the country without telling anyone, without getting a phone or leaving any tracks behind?
• Do you think he is happy in his isolation? Is he making a brave choice by withdrawing to the country, as he has always dreamt of doing, or do you think he’s fleeing the responsibilities of his life?
• How does that day stealing horses with Jon, and learning what has happened to Odd, change Trond? Do you see the effects of that loss in him as an older man?
• There’s a scene in which Trond’s car goes off the road and he sees the lynx in the woods. At the end of the scene, Trond says “I can’t recall when I last felt so alive as when I got the car onto the road again and drove on.” Why does a near accident, and the sight of the lynx, thrill him?
• Were you surprised by Ellen’s reaction to her father when she finds him at the end of the book? Would you be angrier in her position, or more forgiving? Has Trond been unfair to her?
• More broadly, did you see Trond as a sympathetic character or a selfish one?
• Has Trond become like his father, or has he managed to take a different path? What parallels do you see between the lives they lead in the book? 
• Trond seems to prize containment, control, and self-sufficiency, and yet this book is marked by instances of intense irritation on his part – when Lars interrupts his night, at the campfire with his Dad and Jon’s mom, and with his family. What do you think of that juxtaposition?
• We miss a huge swath of Trond’s life – from when he was a teenager to his late 60s. The only thing we know about the in-between years is that he was married twice, had two kids, and that his second wife died and he nearly did too. What do you think those intervening years were like?
• At the end of the book, Trond claims that his life would have changed if he had hit the man in Karlstad. Why does he attach so much significance to that decision not to? 
• How do you think Trond’s life will change after the end of the novel? Will he see more of his daughter? Will he stay in that houses? Will he and Lars become friends, or will he return to the isolation he had sought out when he moved to the country?
• Why do you think Trond’s father doesn’t tell him the story of the Resistance? Why does he leave it to Franz? How do you think Trond’s perception of his father would have changed if his father had told the story himself? 
• Petterson has been widely praised for his descriptions of nature, and of small quiet moments in everyday life. How does his writing make these ordinary moments compelling? Which images of landscapes or domestic scenes remained most vivid in your memory after finishing the book?