A whole storm brewing beneath the placid exterior in Out Stealing Horses

I'm about halfway through (re)reading Per Petterson's 2003 novel, Out Stealing Horses, translated from the Norwegian, and finding it's still an excellent novel, one of the best of the decade - although we've seen little of Petterson since this break-out, who knows why. The narrator, Trond, is a 60-something man who has just bought and moved into a primitive and somewhat neglected small house in rural Norway near the border with Sweden; he's living alone, widowed. In the first chapter he meets one of his few neighbors, Lars, when he steps outside in the night to help L find his stray dog. Trond seems to relish his solitude and his self-reliance. He soon thinks back to a time of his youth - the summer of 1948, when he was 15, and spending the summer w/ his father in a (similar) rustic cabin near a river that crosses from Sweden into Norway (a significant fact that I remember from previous reading but haven't yet reached in the novel this time). Trond and neighbor/friend Jon go "out stealing horses," which isn't stealing but, rather, trespassing into a neighbor's corral and hopping on horses for some bareback riding - dangerous, but they come out OK. After this "horseplay," T watches Jon destroy a bird's nest and its eggs, for no apparent reason. Trond learns from his father that, the day before, Jon was supposed to be watching his 10-year-old twin brothers when, with a gun he'd left unattended, one of the twins, Lars, accidentally shoots and kills his brother. Trond never sees Jon again. But: now back in the present, he recognizes his neighbor as the Lars of his childhood. (In a funny and daring passage, Petterson has his narrator reflect that he wouldn't believe such a coincidence had he read it in a novel!) So at this point in the novel, we have a lot of questions in mind, most notably: What exactly is the narrator running or hiding from? What happened in his youth in 1948 that so traumatized him? What are we to make of the death of his wife in a car accident, which he alludes to quite late in the novel? There are intimations that Trond's father was having an affair w/ Lars's mother, but what will come of that? He and Lars have acknowledged that the recognize each other - "I know who you are," Lars says - but what will come of their recognition? It would only make sense for them to try to "catch up," what happened to Jon?, etc. But in their stoic, Nordic way, they say little to each other. There's lots of mysterious intimations in this novel, and a whole storm building beneath the placid exterior (or interior). Btw, it's hard to imagine anyone but Max von Sydow "playing" lead, if this novel had ever been made into film.