📚 🚶Introducing Our April book
Discover Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson | Dates for May, June, July
Dear walking book clubbers,
April is somewhat off-piste in our reading journey so far this year. While I’ve loved spending the time with women employing resilience to get through various ordeals (in The Ginger Tree, My Ántonia, and The L-Shaped Room), I’m really enjoying the change of scene and company. For Out Stealing Horses, we join Trond, aged 67, in the wilds of isolation in Norway at the end of the twentieth century, when a chance encounter prompts him to look back on a fateful summer of his youth…
Intrigued? Have a listen to THIS wonderful episode of the BBC World Book Club featuring Per Petterson himself - the first twenty minutes or so are spoiler-free.
Read on to discover more about our April pick, including dates of our events, links to further reading, and discussion points to get you thinking. Thanks so much to those of you who have emailed me already to say how much you love this book!
And for those of you who have asked about our next walks, thank you for your patience. Choosing the best books can’t be rushed! I am ON THE CASE with May, June, July and aiming to announce our picks in the next week or two.
For those who would like to save the dates, these are the ones to earmark:
May Regent’s Park 17th | Hampstead Heath 19th | Zoom 20th
June Regent’s Park 21st | Hampstead Heath 23rd | Zoom 24th
July Regent’s Park 19th | Hampstead Heath 21st | Zoom 22nd
We take a break over August and return in September.
Our April Out Stealing Horses Events
Emily’s Regent’s Park Walking Book Club: Friday 12th April, 12-1.45pm, setting off from Daunt Books, 84 Marylebone High Street, W1U 4QW, £8-15
Emily’s Hampstead Heath Walking Book Club: Sunday 14th April, 11.30-1pm, setting off from Daunt Books Hampstead, 51 South End Road, NW3 2QB, £8-15
Emily’s Zoom Book Club: Monday 15th April, 8-8.40pm, £1-10
On Our Reading Radar: Friday 26th April, 1.30-2pm: Solitude Join this month’s discussion thread to share your cultural highlights from the month, as well as your recommendations on the theme of SOLITUDE - Which books and films do you think explore the state of being alone?
Buy Out Stealing Horses from Daunt Books HERE and receive 10% off using the code WBC at checkout, or just tell them you’re in the group if you’re buying it in the shop.
Introducing Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson
When this novel was translated by Anne Born and published in English in 2005 it was something of a sensation, as you’ll see from the glowing reviews below. Most of the action of the novel takes place during the summer of 1948, but we begin with the main character, Trond, now 67, hiding away from the world. An encounter with his neighbour takes him back to that summer, and a double narrative unfolds slipping between the book’s present at the close of the twentieth century, and that summer half a century ago.
It is incredibly hard to write about Out Stealing Horses without giving away a terrible event that happens within the first fifty pages. Please take this as a trigger warning. I am attempting to keep my introduction spoiler-free because that event in the book had such a powerful impact on me when I first read it, I don’t want to cheat you of this! So here goes:
Violence
Although this is a very quiet book, there is a deep violence beneath the surface that occasionally ruptures through to devastating effect. Even moments that shouldn’t feel so brutal are made visceral, such as when Trond drops onto the horse ‘and its shoulder bones hit me in the crotch and sent a jet of nausea up into my throat’. Of course there is a shocking scene following this, when it’s a bird’s egg (not Trond) that drops out of the tree, and the subsequent crushing of the nest. Were you unsettled by the violence in the book?
Mysteries
The book is riddled with mysteries, both as we are with the older Trond trying to come to terms with what’s happened, and the younger Trond, from whom so much is kept. Did you enjoy the process of unravelling these threads or did you find it frustrating? Were there any big surprises for you? I was intrigued to discover more about Petterson’s writing process on the BBC world book club episode, and that he worked everything out as he went along.
Doubles
The book is written as a double narrative, with the novel’s present taking place at the end of the twentieth century, and then long flashbacks to the summer of 1948. Twins are central to the plot, and there is a great deal of doubling as events symbolically echo one another as the action unfolds. What did you make of the doubling? Is it a useful way of bringing a new perspective and finding unexpected resonances to events, or did it ever feel a little forced?
Solitude versus loneliness
Choosing to be alone and feeling lonely is a difference we’ve encountered in previous book group picks. In Out Stealing Horses, the ground between these two states has never felt murkier! Is Trond in a positive state of solitude, or is he in fact suffering from abject loneliness? Or does this change through the book? I’m looking forward to sharing more tips on books that explore solitude - or indeed loneliness! - in our On Our Reading Radar discussion thread on 26th April.
And finally…
The book ends with this rather extraordinary line:
‘we do decide for ourselves when it will hurt.’
This first appears in the context of Trond’s father pulling out nettles with his bare hands, but of course has emotional resonance as well as physical. What do you think? Are we in control of our own feelings of hurt, or do others decide for us?
Discover more about the book and author
I highly recommend THIS episode of the BBC World Book Club. Harriet Gilbert does such a brilliant job, along with great questions from the audience, and Per Petterson’s answers are fascinating! They also succeed in not giving away any spoilers until around half-way through the episode, so I’d urge everyone to listen to the first twenty minutes or so.
HERE is an excellent and very thorough (full of spoilers) review by Thomas McGuane in the New York Times, which concludes:
This short yet spacious and powerful book — in such contrast to the well-larded garrulity of the bulbous American novel of today — reminds us of the careful and apropos writing of J. M. Coetzee, W. G. Sebald and Uwe Timm. Petterson’s kinship with Knut Hamsun, which he has himself acknowledged, is palpable in Hamsun’s “Pan,” “Victoria” and even the lighthearted “Dreamers.” But nothing should suggest that his superb novel is so embedded in its sources as to be less than a gripping account of such originality as to expand the reader’s own experience of life.
THIS from Kirkus Reviews is shorter but somehow even more spoiler-heavy!
Here is the trailer for the acclaimed film, which was released three years’ ago. Those who want to absolutely avoid any hint of spoilers perhaps should refrain from watching it, even the trailer:
HERE by James Campbell for the Guardian and HERE by Claire Kirsch for Publishers Weekly are two fascinating interviews with the author.
If you’d like to read more of Petterson’s work, have a look at the handy website Fantastic Fiction HERE, where there’s a list of titles and basic information to help you decide which one to go for next.
What’s next???
Books to be revealed soon. Here again are the dates to block out for those who are more organised than I am!
May Regent’s Park 17th | Hampstead Heath 19th | Zoom 20th
June Regent’s Park 21st | Hampstead Heath 23rd | Zoom 24th
July Regent’s Park 19th | Hampstead Heath 21st | Zoom 22nd
Happy reading,
Emily