out stealing horses review

Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I don't really know how to write fiction reviews. For the last few years I've been a bit over fiction, only reading something if it comes with a strong recommendation by a friend. This book ended up in my hands because I was in an opshop and it looked like the kind of sweet, inoffensive thing that my mum would like. The cover had a horse and a cabin and a misty forest. 'Out Stealing Horses'. Cute. It was only 50c.

Not wanting to pass on any old trash to her I did a quality-assurance check, reading the first few pages. A few days later and I was almost finished. I'd forgotten how satisfying it is when someone speaks your language, uses it to tell a story that penetrates deep and messes you up. The unfolding of Out Stealing Horses is beautiful. Trond, the narrator, follows incidental thoughts with a sparseness and intensity that is not there to convince or portray faithfully, but rather as dot points for further introspection. It is not always clear why they are significant but the effect is one of bearing witness to formative moments in the creation of 'character'. We are all ultimately inaccessible to eachother- to tell the story of our selves would take a lifetime. Spending a brief moment suspended in someone else's reality is the best we can hope for. Reading this I did feel suspended; not coerced or directed, just observing, feeling.

In Trond's own words:

“People like it when you tell them things, in suitable portions, in a modest, intimate tone, and they think they know you, but they do not, they know about you, for what they are let in on are facts, not feelings, not what your opinion is about anything at all, not how what has happened to you and how all the decisions you have made have turned you into who you are. What they do is they fill in with their own feelings and opinions and assumptions, and they compose a new life which has precious little to do with yours, and that lets you off the hook. No-one can touch you unless you yourself want them to.”

The darkness was something that appealed to me, though at times I felt the death and suffering verged on melodrama. That was until I learned that Per Petterson's mother, father, brother, and cousin all died in an accident when he was in his thirties. Tragedy is all around us, and those of us who know it best have it ingrained in our story. Out Stealing Horses is deeply personal without being trite, and though the end does wane slightly, I consider it to be an exceptionally well-written book. The smallest of things are suffused with feeling and reflection, transforming the mundane into the profound, and the living forest breathes out of the pages into the air around you.

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disorder of the day

psychiatric disorders. now there’s a bit of fun. like people obsessed with being in love, or politics, or game of thrones, it is something I could talk about all day every day. my most profound and deep thoughts centre around my own dysfunctionality; I can’t get it out of my head. so how do you reconcile with your deepest thoughts also being your most despised? passion is the experience of following your deepest impulses, giving voice to them. one of my deepest impulses is to disappear. I normalise this impulse by removing myself into the wilderness, onto the road, away. it feels good, I like it more than anything else in life. I just feel like a wild little animal trapped in a world I don’t comprehend or connect with. it’s like trying to frame waves. the confusion makes me insane as I oscillate in and out of a delusion that I can belong, if I just tune out the fear, if I just figure out how to be genuinely myself in a specific way that is genuinely belonging

what to do with it. booze and drugs provide nice temporary obfuscation, but mostly I just get through one day, then get through another, until the tumult subsides enough to think about anything the hell else. for a reason I can’t entirely articulate prescription meds have been something I’ve avoided, except for a very brief, uneventful stint with anti-depressants seven years ago. maybe I’ve started to come around to them now because I see more clearly than ever that I am at odds with my own chemistry. as the anxiety of youth dies away I am left standing here just feeling kind of unimpressed, in a way that is actually kinda strengthening, hardening. there is, more than ever, a fairly firm core of values to my character, so when these manic episodes of delusion&downfall wash by- which they still do, frequently- I generally just feel humiliated and isolated by my own self

what’s it all about. I cherish my wildness, my undomesticated heathen disregard for all the unnatural strictures. the last thing I want to do is throw in that towel for some baseline normative reality. but  it also leaves me fractured; I dream of taking the wildness and living the shit out of it, like just being a filthy radical dero with other wildfolk and enjoying this little blip we have together. what has made that unachieveable so far? is it a medically alterable chemistry? is it deeply wired ‘personality’, made up of billions of hypercomplex neuronal interactions, i.e. indomitable chaos? we tend to be pretty lenient with ourselves, we think that our bad attitudes and behaviours are just symptoms of not blossoming how we ‘should have’, and that maybe it just needs a bit of fertiliser; the potential is there afterall… but ofcourse you never blossom, not really, not beyond the usual getting older, more self-knowing, more shrewd. if you accept the stunted-blossom theory of shittiness then you kind of can’t hold anyone responsible for anything ever, it’s all just action-reaction. personality becomes a placeholder for unrealised potential to be the best possible you. “it’s not my fault, I’m actually great- it was those bullies who made me an arsehole”. which I actually believe in broader cosmic terms, while simultaneously believing that everyone has an ethical/moral obligation to be ecofeminist warriors or whatever, and judge them for not being. ha ha

so what to do with it. I don’t know. early check-out feels like an inevitability so I’m not too stressed about it, in the mean time I think I might start taking some anti-depressants and see if they can level me up a bit, lift the haze of bitterness so that I can stop feeling compelled to write self-indulgent blog entries like this and instead write about practical, good things. like how to build your own straw-bale house or do your own mechanics

scenes from a beach