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• 素晴らしい小説です。 just a good book.

  約250ページと短い小説です。北欧を舞台にした、あまり日本人にはなじみのない設定です。しかし、内容は素晴らしかったです。自然の描写。匂い。色。とても読みやすいproseで読者に訴えかけます。余分な言葉をそぎ落とし、クリアなイメージで読者を捕える。また、個々の読者も参加し取り込まれれていく感じです。年老いた主人公が回想する少年時代の一瞬の記憶。すべての人が経験していく事ではないでしょうか？ とにかくお薦めです。 This book is a short novella, which is less than 250 pages. The setting is in Norway where most Japanese readers are not familiar with. However, the book fascinates me filled with the clear images of natures. smell. color. Easy to read with very good prose captivating the readers. Wtihout using many mords, the book makes the readers involved in the story. Evey reader has to participate in the story with his or her experiences. Old people have to face thier crucial momory given when they were young. I highly recommend this book!!

• This book was selected for the Round the World book group. We all loved it. The hero, Trond, is 15 in 1948 when he spends a summer in the country with his father. Later in the book he is an older man of 67, living in an isolated part of Norway. Trond, at 15, has a friend called Jon whom he met when he is away with his father on the land which he has bought. There is a tragedy when Jon, who has gone shooting hares, leaves his gun lying about when he is supposed to be looking after his younger brothers. One of the brothers starts to pay with it and kills the other brother. Later we see Trond and his father helping the local landowner with the hay harvest. The description of this, in the 1940's, and the preparations to make certain that the hay will dry properly, is fascinating. The passage where Trond describes his first experience in watching a lynx is wonderful. No one believes him since they seem to be rare in those parts. The war intrudes into the idyll which the young Trond inhabits. The Germans occupy Norway, arriving through neutral Sweden. A detachment of young men, little more than boys, is posted to the village. The locals cultivate them, putting them at their ease and lulling them so that they are not aware of what is going on. Trond's father becomes a courier for the resistance. He chats to the guards, offers them cigarettes, smokes with them so that they get used to him walking up the road with his sack. He carries mail and papers to go to Sweden. A neighbour's wife is also involved. She brings someone who has to escape to Sweden, and takes him in a boat. His fear leads him to make considerable noise in the boat, drawing the attention of one of the infrequent German patrols. Trond's father activates the already laid explosive charge and blows up the bridge. The boat reaches the other side of the river, but the refugee is killed. The woman and Trond's father escape to Sweden. Strangely, there seem to be no repercussions against the villagers. As we approach the end of the book, the adult Trond's daughter Ellen visits him. She has sought him out, with great difficulty. It is an emotional reunion, written beautifully. We go back in time again. Young Trond is on a three day riding expedition with his father. The description is wonderful. You see what Trond sees riding through the woods, and you can almost feel the movement as the horse changes pace. After Trond took the decisive action which led to breaking the log-jam, the strengthening of the bond between father and son is almost palpable. We move forward again to a time when Trond's father has been away for a considerable period. A letter arrives. It says that he will not be coming back from Sweden. There is an authorisation for Trond's mother to go to a bank in Sweden and collect the money which was made from the timber floated down the river to Sweden. The description of the train journey is clarity itself. There isn't much money, and it must be spent in Sweden under the currency laws prevailing at the time. Trond's mother buys him a suit. The 15 year old Trond grew up that day. He made a decision which led ultimately to the 67 year old man we have met in this book. Any other decision at that crucial moment would have taken him on an entirely different, and not so good, direction through life, and he would have become a different person from the one we know. Please read this book. I think you will love it as much as we all did. Our average score of 8.5 put "Out Stealing Horses" in joint second place in our list of favourites from the last eight years of our trip round the world.

• Awesome book... Enjoyed every bit of it.

• The atmospheres created by northern landscapes have always held a strong attraction for me. Whether by personal exposure or when represented in paintings, music or literature, the vastness of space, rugged coastlines, deep dark forests and, above all, the crystal clear colours brought on by the specific climates, their lure can be ever so powerful. In Per Petterson's OUT STEALING HORSES sixty-seven year old Trond Sander is profoundly drawn to such a place: he leaves Oslo and settles in a remote cabin somewhere in north-eastern Norway. Skilfully portrayed by the author, the character superbly fits the environment: he is somebody who responds completely to that lure of tranquility, the promise of harmony with his surroundings that gives time for contemplation of his life and keeps him occupied with the daily chores required to fix up the very basic cabin he had bought. And finally, he may also find some answer to a question that has been with him ever since one summer vacation in a comparable place when he was fifteen years old... Trond Sander has all the time in the world now, as he ponderously goes through the daily chores of a self-sufficient hermit. Time is taking a different meaning for him as he reflects early on: "Time is important to me now, I tell myself. Not that it should pass quickly or slowly, but be only time, be something I live inside and fill with physical things and activities that I can divide it by, so that it grows distinct to me and does not vanish when I am not looking." An encounter in the middle of the night with another apparent recluse, who lives down the river, annoys him initially as an interruption of his private time. Yet, when he realizes that the man is his boyhood friend's brother, Lars, his peace of mind is disrupted in a fundamental way. Memories come to the fore that were long buried in his mind, or were they really? From then on his musings of that one fateful summer vacation with his father take over much of his mental time. What appears initially to be the account of an ordinary, uneventful past, turns very soon into a special time that may have influenced the rest of his life. The reader is transported into a narrative that alternates between Trond's descriptions of daily activities in the here and now and the events during the summer vacation with his father when he was fifteen. In all aspects, it was a watershed time for young Trond, a growing up period where the awkwardness of youth was combined with a new appreciation of a men's world of hard labour mixed with camaraderie, jokes and loyalties. Two tragic accidents involving his friend Jon, brother Lars and their family, shape the rest of the vacation and life afterwards. Delicate in its description, the reader is inescapably drawn to Trond and his surroundings. There are allusions to the reasons for his father's surprising familiarity with the small village and its people that the boy can describe yet without full understanding of their meaning. While father and son have a close relationship in many ways, there is a certain verbal awkwardness between them and it needs Franz, one of his father's work friend, to play a sort of intermediary to explain to the son what the father is and was all about. Strange? Maybe, but it completely matches the impression the reader develops of the central characters. Trond, now with the hindsight of some fifty years, can make more sense of some of the events of the past and, in his mind, can put them into a wider context. From the outset, though. his present day reflections are interspersed with subtle hints to the past and, once the reader knows the story and goes back to read the beginning a second time, they will fall into place perfectly. Will he be able to answer that one life-long question? Well, maybe. The concluding part of the novel is at one level surprising and at another open-ended. Just as life is. Petterson's language is spare and efficient in its use of imagery and evocation of atmospheres, both internal and external to his protagonist. While it is correct, as other reviewers have stated, that very little happens in the novel and the story unfolds ever so slowly, a reader like myself is easily fascinated by the character and completely drawn into the two sets of situations, past and present. With a narration style that leaves the reader to ponder, compare, and visualize, and fill in mental spaces, Petterson has achieved a remarkable work of fiction. [Friederike Knabe]

• Characters didn't develop very well.

• OUT STEALING HORSES is an extraordinary novel, one of the best contemporary novels I have ever read. The story continually switches back and forth between 1948, when the narrator, then fifteen, spent the summer with his father in a rural, forested area near the Norway-Sweden border (a sort of coming-of-age summer, and the last summer he spent with his father), and the present (actually 1999) as the narrator attempts to make for himself a new, quiet life as a semi-recluse in another forested area of Norway. The narrator, Trond Sander, has experienced in his 67 years more than his fair share of psychic and physical blows (most of which are only implied or very lightly sketched), but he seems to have absorbed the lesson his father taught him in the summer of '48 when, after Trond balked at weeding a plot of nettles, his father pulled the nettles out of the ground with his bare hands, saying, "You decide for yourself when it will hurt." The novel is a marvel of mood and ambiance; it is psychologically astute; and, although almost meditative in nature, there is plenty of plot and action -- including the "stealing horses" of the title, a tragic shooting of one sibling by another, and Resistance activities in Nazi-occupied Norway. But it is the superb writing that most distinguishes the novel -- both the plain but lush, leisurely language (which reminds me of Cormac McCarthy in his "Border Trilogy") and brilliantly observed and described vignettes of small, everyday scenes and experiences. One example: "I found a milking stool in the gangway between the gutters and sat down on it by the door I had shut behind me, and I closed my eyes and heard the cows' peaceful breathing behind each stall and their jaws working just as peacefully and the clanking sound of the bells and the creaking of the timbers and the soughing of the night over the roof which was not the wind but the combined hum of all that the night contained. And then I fell asleep." Towards the end of the novel, Trond's adult daughter pays him a surprise visit (she had to call town councils for eighty miles around to find where he had holed up), and she recalls that when she was a girl Trond had always been reading Dickens. (Earlier in the novel Trond reflected that "when you read Dickens you're reading a long ballad from a vanished world, * * * where the balance of what was once disturbed must be restored so that the gods can smile again.") It turns out that both Trond and his daughter have always been fascinated by the first line of "David Copperfield": "Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show." It appears that for Trond, near the end of his life and looking back, it was not he but rather his father who was the hero of that life. But it also appears that that realization does not really trouble Trond -- because "we do decide for ourselves when it will hurt." At least those are two of the many interpretations or lessons I come away with after my initial reading of the novel, all of which may well change upon re-reading it. One thing is certain: OUT STEALING HORSES warrants re-reading, likely even multiple times.

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