50 pages • 1 hour read
Per Petterson, Transl. Anne BornOut Stealing Horses
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2003A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Finding a Sense of Place in Nature
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses Nazi persecution of Jewish people and the accidental death of a child.
In literature, the natural world is often a representation of the sublime and transcendent, and Romantic traditions posit that humans’ relationships with nature flow both ways; by contrast, Per Petterson told Tree of Life Review that it is not his intent to suggest the human soul influences nature but instead that “[n]ature seeps into us, changing the way we observe life” (Stocke, Joy E. “Language Within Silence—An Interview With Norwegian Writer Per Petterson.” Tree of Life Review). In Out Stealing Horses, Trond’s connection to nature stems from his own impressions of it and the way it helps him more clearly see himself and his place in the world. Petterson suggests that people’s connection to nature exists in their observations, evidenced by Trond’s reflection that “it is as if the tinted air binds the world together and there is nothing disconnected out there. That’s a good thing to think about, but whether it is true or not is a different matter” (99). The way Trond thinks about nature gives context to his memories and illustrates his mood; he sees in nature a reflection of his own emotions, which differ greatly from past to present.
Trond’s memories of the summer of 1948 are tinged with nostalgia for a time when the world made sense. Often in those days, he feels in harmony and at one with nature, describing the work of felling trees: “I smelled of resin, my clothes smelled, and my hair smelled, and my skin smelled of resin when I lay in my bed at night. I went to sleep with it and woke up with it and it stayed with me all the day long. I was forest” (80). For Trond, a sense of rightness comes from the feeling of exhaustion and accomplishment he gets, and the smell of resin remaining on his skin is a reminder of the pride he feels while working with his father, which is what truly stays with him all day long. When chopping a dead spruce in his yard in 1999, however, Trond meticulously picks the wood chips out of his boots and off of his trousers; since the work means less to him, he does not feel the same connection he once did. Similarly, 15-year-old Trond has no fear of bad weather or of being cold, but 67-year-old Trond has to remind himself not to panic whenever he thinks about getting snowed in during the coming winter.
Petterson also uses Trond’s observations of nature to illustrate his efforts to find a measure of his significance, both to his father and in the world. Before he discovers his father and Jon’s mother kissing, he describes the feeling of standing alone in the moonlight “with the water surging against [his] boots, and everything else was so big and so quiet around [him], but [he] did not feel abandoned, [he] felt singled out. [He] was perfectly calm, [he] was the anchor of the world” (109); he still feels that he is the center of his father’s world. However, when revisiting the memory of Franz telling him about his father’s double life, Trond recalls imagining the weight of the universe and the feeling of floating away into the stars, how “thinking about it could make you vanish a little” (136). His sense of insignificance in the universe mirrors his shrinking sense of significance in his father’s life.
Elsewhere, shifts in Trond’s relationship to the natural world emphasize the extent to which his father’s leaving has made him feel lost or misdirected in life. When he is traveling to Sweden with his mother along the Glomma river, he recalls previously feeling that he was “friends with water” and thinks the Glomma is “a call from the big river that was swelling away in the opposite direction from the way [they] were travelling” (21, 245). This observation conveys his feeling that his life has suddenly gone off course and his urgent desire to follow the river so his world will make sense again. In the narrative present, his return to the setting of his youth demonstrates an effort to do just that.
Solitude and Time for Self-Reflection
The notion of using solitude to come to grips with the passage of time is central to Trond’s retreat into the Norwegian woods, also indicating his recognition of his own mortality. He repeatedly explains that he bought the cabin to be alone because since the death of his wife and sister, he no longer knows what to talk to people about. He also says he has always had “a longing to be in a place where there was only silence” (7), and that all he wants is time that “does not vanish when [he is] not looking” (8). Trond’s descriptions of his former adult life, when he traveled for such long periods of time that it seemed as though his daughters had grown more each time he returned home, suggest that much of his life has already vanished while he was not looking. The use of the word “vanishing” later becomes a leitmotif in the novel connected with mortality, as Trond essentially vanishes into his solitude; so strong is his desire to disappear that he doesn’t leave even a phone number where his daughters can reach him.
Trond’s retreat into rural solitude reflects an effort to both escape and accept his mortality, reflected in the impression after his wife died that “if [he] too were not to die, […] [he] had to go to the forest” (122). He feels he must retreat into solitude to cope with the grief and guilt of his wife’s death and soothe the wound of losing her. Ironically, Trond also fears too much solitude, worrying constantly about getting snowed in or how being alone for too long might affect him mentally or socially. His anxiety about excess solitude results in occasional excursions into town for errands; he calls such errands “social profligacy,” suggesting he feels it is wasting time that could be spent in solitary reflection. He also tries to stave off the effects of too much solitude by taking meticulous care with dressing himself and cleaning the cabin in order to avoid becoming “a shipwrecked man without an anchor in the world except his own liquid thoughts where time has lost its sequence” (210), which illustrates his fear that losing track of time is akin to his own mortality.
The solitary setting also connects with the motif of doubles and shows Trond’s efforts to find a sense of place in his life and connection with his father. His cabin in the forest mirrors his father’s cabin—through the appearance of Lars, even the identity of his neighbor is duplicated—with the notable exception of the different seasons: In 1948, Trond is in the summer of his life, when anything might happen; in 1999, he is in the winter of his life, nearing its end. He often explains that when he has a task to complete he imagines how his father would have done it. However, he has no model for the task of facing the end of his life: His father was only 40 when he left the family, and Trond remarks, “To me he will never be older” (76). Instead, he has come to the cabin to be alone, to solve problems alone, like he imagines his father did at his own cabin during the war. With time and solitude, he believes, he will be able to make sense of his life and possibly escape the pain of losing the people who have vanished from it.
The Pivotal Role of History in Shaping Identity
More than by any other force, the characters in the novel are shaped by personal and national history. Big and small moments during the war and in Trond’s memories illustrate how pivotal events can alter the course of a person’s life. For Trond, understanding the impact of these moments is central to understanding the person he has become; his efforts to parse the meaning of his father’s disappearance marks it as the most pivotal event in his life—an event that shapes his view of himself, his identity, and what it means to him to be a man. His father’s motivation for leaving is “the vital question [Trond has] put to [himself] again and again in the time that followed” (126). His efforts to understand this motivation begin with revisiting the morning he went out “stealing horses” with Jon; upon reflection, he “should have understood there was something special about that July morning, […] something in the way Jon said what he had to say or the way he moved or stood there stock still at the door. But [Trond] was only fifteen” (19). It is significant that Trond notes his age since that morning marks the beginning of his passage into adulthood.
These pivotal moments—whether of personal or national significance—often mark the destruction of a former life or of the characters’ ability to exist in that life in the same way. Trond’s morning out stealing horses with Jon is notable for its timing in Jon’s life as well; it is the morning after Jon accidentally leaves his gun unsecured, and Lars shoots Odd, a morning when he had been “his brothers’ keeper, and in one instant everything was changed and destroyed” (159). The death of this twin is mirrored in Trond’s reference to the death of his Uncle Amund, also a twin, during the war, building a connection between the significance of personal and national histories. Though the morning after Odd’s death is the catalyst for personal events that summer, those events were already set in motion during the pivotal period when Trond’s father was part of the Norwegian Resistance. When Jon’s mother and Trond’s father fled into Sweden and Franz blew up the bridge to keep the German soldiers from following, these events both figuratively and literally severed the connection between what had been and what would be.
The German occupation proves a pivotal historic moment in the lives of the characters. As a young boy, Trond recognizes the impact of this history, and the arrival of German troops is imprinted viscerally in his memory: “[I]t was cold that day and silent in the street, and only the unison crash of boots, like the crack of a whip, beat in among the columns in front of the university building” (114). As an older man, he recalls the impact of the war and occupation on his relationship with his father, a time when “months could pass when [Trond] did not see him, and when finally he came home and walked the streets like any other man, he was different in a way it was hard for [Trond] to pinpoint. […] and [Trond] had to concentrate hard to hold on to him” (138). Readers know that Trond will not be able to hold on to his father, and it is the events of the war that ultimately take his father from him for good, as the bond he formed with Jon’s mother during that time proves the undoing of the bond he had with his family. Trond’s memories, along with his attempts to reconcile events from the past with who he has become, confirm Petterson’s assertion that the present is continually influenced by personal and historic events that people carry with them in their memories.
