Review of OUT STEALING HORSES

A crystalline portrait of what we think we know ...

Stuck on a little boat in a beautiful French canal, recovering from inferno heat, I needed a novel that might feel like a drink of clear, cool water. My cousin came to the rescue with a 2003 Pers Peterson novel, Out Stealing Horses. I had no background with this Norwegian writer beyond my cousin’s recommendation and the critically enthusiastic blurbs that I kept returning to as I tip-toed into this 264 page Scandinavian morality tale. Written with refreshing clarity and economy, Out Stealing Horses is a treasure. Maybe I was set up for it by the slowing of time that is a canal trip in a 30 foot fiberglass boat that barely squeezes through the flower festooned locks … or maybe I would have appreciated it’s literary merits in an airport. Regardless, Peterson writes a sometimes confusing but ultimately effective blend of a coming of age story and an old man’s memoir. His descriptions of the natural worlds of Norway provide for both versions of his protagonist a canvas on which to paint a moving and honest series of sketches about what we want to know and how we know it. One feels, from the very first paragraph, the presence of an evolved Hemingway style of writing that invites the reader to fill the gaps between Peterson’s carefully chosen words. As hoped, the novel felt like an arresting, eye-opening dip into the cold waters of the fjords … a long ways from the languid waters of a late summer canal trip in Brittany

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