2009 Mini Challenges – New Author

Per Petterson (b. July 18, 1952 – Oslo, Norway)

To satisfy #7 of the 2009 Novel Challenges Mini Challenge (Read a book by a new to you author) I read Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson (read my review).

Petterson has published a collection of short stories and five novels. Out Stealing Horses won the 2007 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award as well as the 2006 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

Perhaps most surprising is Petterson’s technique of writing novels. He does not plan them.

That is disappointing to some readers, I know. But for me it shows the strength of art. It is like carving out a sculpture from some material. You have to go with the quality of the material and not force upon it a form that it will not yield to anyway. That will only look awkward. Early in the book [Out Stealing Horses], in the 1948 part, I let the two fathers (of my main characters, Jon and Trond) have a problem with looking at each other. And I wondered, why is that? So I thought, well, it’s 1948, only three years after the Germans left Norway. It has to be something with the war. And then I thought, shit, I have to write about the war. You see, I hate research.

In October 2008, the New Yorker published a wonderful piece titled Fire and Ice – about Petterson and his latest translated novel (To Siberia). Jeffrey Frank (from the New Yorker) writes:

Petterson could be labelled a “prose stylist,” except you never feel that he is styling anything; you feel that he is simply setting down sentences, unaffected by slang and hip foreign expressions. (This comes through remarkably well in the faithful translations of Anne Born.) His plots unfold much as life does, taking unexpected turns that force the author to confront destiny’s hazards.

AND

Petterson’s real interest, though, is in the physical and emotional distances that separate his characters from each other and from their former selves.

And although Frank is specifically writing about To Siberia, it could just as well have described Petterson’s writing in Out Stealing Horses.

Per Petterson is a new to me author – but I will be reading more of his books. I like his slow development of the story, and the depth of his characterizations.

Read Petterson’s biography.

Find his books on Amazon.