Out Stealing Horses

I decided it was time to read something that wasn't about some horrible war going on around the world... but it turned out not to be as easy as I thought it would be. I chose Out Stealing Horses by Per Pettersen, which is about an older Norwegian man named Trond living a quiet contemplative life in a remote part of Norway. It sounded nice and peaceful, but I should have noticed on the Amazon description that something happens that evokes memories of 1948... duh, WWII.

Anyway, I got totally caught up in the novel, including the war part -- a really fascinating story about love and betrayal -- and I loved Pettersen's use of language and descriptions of the natural world and Trond's place in it:

"I shut my eyes into a squint and looked across the water flowing past below the window, shining and glittering like a thousand stars, like the Milky Way could sometimes do in the autumn rushing foamingly on and winding through the night in an endless stream, and you could lie out there beside the fjord at home in the vast darkness with your back against the hard sloping rock gazing up until your eyes hurt, feeling the weight of the universe in all of its immensity press down on your chest until you could scarcely breathe or on the contrary be lifted up and simply float away like a mere speck of human flesh in a limitless vacuum, never to return. Just thinking about it could make you vanish a little."

Pettersen moves from present to past smoothly and doesn't give too much away too soon. But unfortunately, it all ends abruptly, and I felt the author wrapped things up way too quickly, as if he just got tired of the story and wanted to move on to something else.