horses

I sat watching her with my back against the wall in the light of the lamp she had hung from a hook beside the stall; the knotted scarf holding back her hair, the golden light on her face, her inward-looking gaze and the half smile, her bare arms, and the bare knees glowing faintly below her skirts on each side of the pail, and I could not help it, but inside my trousers I grew tight so suddenly and with such force I had to gasp for breath, and I could not even remember thinking about her in that way before. I held fast to the stool with both hands and felt unfaithful towards the one I really had on my mind and knew that if I moved as much as one centimetre now, the least friction would ruin everything, and she would see it and may be hear the helpless whimper in my chest that was already straining to get out, and then she would know how pathetic I was, and I could not bear that. So I had to think about other things to ease the pressure, and first I thought about horses as I had seen them running down the road throught the village, many horses of many colours with pounding hooves raising the dust on the tinder-dry road, whirling it up and draping it like yellow curtains between the houses and the church, but that did not help me a lot, for there was something about the heat of those horses and their curved necks and rhythmic breathing as they galloped along, and all the things about horses that are hard to explain, but you knew were there, and then I thought about the Bunnefjord instead.

in Out Stealing Horses
Per Petterson

So far, so good. My impressions: I have loved the book just until the beginning of part two, I believe the war element, the resistance, the laying down of the father's life was unnecessary. It had been a coming of age, an almost Mark Twain by the Mississipi in the Norwegian forest, the boy mirrored in the old man and the old man echoeing the boy. I enjoyed the masculine details of work, tools, felling trees, farm work, repair work. Very interesting how a Norwegian author is so much, like the rest of us, under the spell of American imagery and myth. Tow Sayer is everybody's childhood, an universal icon. The west and open spaces, horses, lumberjacks, all American symbols of freedom surounding an old man who desires to free himself from the constraint of social living. This story could take place in Minnesota, easily. I cannot help but compare Petterson's aging to Philip Roth's take on the subject, Everyman. Acceptance and denial.

And here, an interesting interview: Language Within Silence, an Interview with Per Petterson.