Posted by Steven
on 5/10/2009, 11:04:11
76.187.110.226
If you read enough books eventually you'll encounter a situation where the scene you are reading is being duplicated at that moment in the real world.
Last week I was at my mother-in-law's house to get a dying tree removed that was threatening to fall on the house. Some limbs had already fallen and damaged a toolshed. As two workmen were cutting up the tree with chainsaws, I was sitting outside reading Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson. I came to a central passage in the novel where... two men are using chainsaws to cut up a dead tree that has fallen and damaged a toolshed. I certainly had no trouble picturing the scene or imagining the scream of the saws, the smell of hot oil and sawdust!
Out Stealing Horses won the IMPAC Dublin Award and the International Foreign Fiction prize. I enjoyed it very much, but I have to say that it was oddly similar to our recent reading selection The Sea by John Banville. Both novels are narrated by a recently widowed man who has chosen to move to a place that evokes memories of a traumatic summer of his childhood. (In The Sea it is the same place; in Out Stealing Horses it is a similar location.) Both novels alternate a "present day" narrative with scenes from that summer, and in both cases narrator is rather coy about revealing what happens. In both novels there is an adult daughter. Lastly, in both cases the narrator has encountered a key figure from that past summer and has an awkward relationship with him/her.
The similarities between The Sea and Out Stealing Horses go only so far. The language is totally different--Petterson's prose is more Hemingway to Banville's Nabokov. The circumstances of the traumatic summer are also completely different, leading to a different set of emotions and conflicts.
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