Recently, while re-reading Out Stealing Horses, I also happened to be rereading Hemingway, and it occurred to me that the two are similar. In Per Petterson’s novel, as in many of Hemingway’s, characters’ lives – like real lives – are deeply rooted in the physical world. Even the narrator echoes Hemingway’s narrators, saying at one point, “No one can touch you unless you yourself want them to.”
Yet unlike many American novels with fully drawn-out dramas, Out Stealing Horses is written in a quiet, controlled manner that offers glimpses of W.G. Sebald. If resonating with the work of either Hemingway or Sebald is enough to make a novel good, Out Stealing Horses, with its echoes of both, is a rare book indeed.
Read an excerpt from Out Stealing Horses.
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