Per Petterson is Norwegian, and his book Out Stealing Horses was translated into English in 2005. It was named one of the Best Books of the Year by the New York Times Book Review. They were right.

After a somewhat bumpy start, which may have something to do with the reader easing into the quiet and slightly foreign voice of the main character, this book comes together, weaves a spell, and leaves you with the feeling that you’ve brushed shoulders with significance.

The theme of an old man revisiting his youth isn’t new, but this old man doesn’t simply revisit it. He re-inhabits it. And as we come to understand the events that shaped the child and, in the process, the man, we come away with more than either the boy or the man may care to contemplate. This is one of those rare books that somehow becomes more than the sum of its parts.

And there’s another interesting thing going on here. There’s an attitude toward life that is hard to come by in this particular era, in this particular country, in this particular time of great expectations—though perhaps it will reappear now that we are experiencing our own national trial. The characters in Out Stealing Horses are both splendid and faulty. No one escapes catastrophe of one sort or another. Yet because it all plays out under the fifty year old memory of something far worse, a time when people were sorely tried and rose to great heights and/or fell to great depths, a time when civilization only barely managed to stagger on, the players here are granted a kind of absolution, an acceptance, a sense of ‘well, we are both good and bad, and what else would you expect?’ And that is strangely comforting—that there is no blaming, no whining, no assigning of guilt or innocence—comforting that we should be allowed to fail ourselves and fail others and not necessarily be condemned for it. That the weakness in us should be as inevitable as the strength. Because it is understood that the lives we lead are heaven and hell enough.