January 4, 2008
Per Petterson profile
Per Petterson’s novel Out Stealing Horses, translated from Norwegian and published by Graywolf Press, was one of my favorite books read last year. Its plain lyricism is terribly affecting, and Petterson does a wonderful job of weaving together the two narratives featuring Trond, the book’s narrator—one occurring when he was a boy, stretching the length of a summer during World War II, and the other taking place in the present, as he settles into senescence in a small village in eastern Norway.
I saw Petterson read at 192 Books last autumn. I quickly came to identify the author with his narrator, and to admire him for what seemed to me like his tacit acknowledgement, as he batted away the more inane questions of the evening’s moderator, of the inherent silliness of book publicity. So it was somewhat surprising, then, to discover a lengthy profile of the author in the Los Angeles Times on Tuesday. (It originally ran on December 26 in the Washington Post.) Here is an excerpt:
In [a bookcase in his parents’ house] were "Leo Tolstoy, Dostoevski, Sigrid Undset, the Norwegian—all kinds of books," Petterson says. On a whim, when he was 12 or 13, "I just sat down on the stairs behind the bookcase and I just took a book out. I didn't know why. And I opened it." Eventually, he read most of what was there, including "Gone With the Wind" in a Norwegian translation.
"I thought it was fabulous," he says, laughing. "Wow, passion!"
A few years later, he read Jack London's "Martin Eden." The story of "this man sort of raising himself up by his own hair almost, and trying to break through the wall of culture," he says, "made me want to be a writer." So did works by the Danish-Norwegian author Aksel Sandemose and by Ernest Hemingway, who made Petterson wonder how such simple writing could have so much impact.
"I'm going to crack that code," he thought.
By the time he was 18, he knew that all he wanted was to write. There was a problem, though: He couldn't finish anything. "I was a coward," he says. "If I finished a story, I could see it was no good. I didn't want that."
Instead, he trained as a librarian, worked in a printing plant and finally got a job at an Oslo bookstore, where he became the foreign book buyer. "As long as I could sell it, I could do anything I liked," he says.
But he was miserable not writing.
To read the rest, click here.
UPDATE, 01/05: While browsing the New York Sun's archive of book reviews this morning, I came across this recommendation of Out Stealing Horses from Benjamin Lytal, one of the paper's regular critics:
Per Petterson's "Out Stealing Horses" (Graywolf, 258 pages, $22) was less anticipated, but numerous critics noticed it once it got here. Not as heady as W.G. Sebald, Mr. Petterson seems to have slid into American consciousness in a similar way, from a similar place: Their very reserved way of ranging out across the European terrain, with World War II persisting in the back of their minds, is very strange and impressive to us. One author I know compared it, very favorably, to Marilynne Robinson's "Housekeeping," and that comparison seems right: Ms. Robinson's highly personal views of American history have enabled her to write about its people and their landscape with such rare, poignant authority. "Out Stealing Horses" does the same, convincingly, for a northern Norway landscape we will probably never know. A tale not only of a mind in winter, but of a city man's mind in the country, the story is tough and graceful enough to please almost any reader.
Lytal also recommends Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives and Mahmoud Dowlatabadi's Missing Soluch.