The intricately plotted and totally Scandinavian Out Stealing Horses, and a note on a New Yorker story

Per Petterson's 2003 novel, Out Stealing Horses, a surprise literary success in its time (how many other Norwegian novels have been best-sellers in the U.S.? Not many) holds up well, an intricately plotted story of a 63-year-old man who has more or less cut himself off from his family and from most social relations, living in a somewhat rundown cabin in far eastern Norway who, through a coincidental contact with a person from his past, finds himself wrestling with the trauma of his young years, in particular his father's unexplained abandonment and disappearance. There are many beautiful passages, particularly the descriptions of logging and a long horseback journey across the border into Sweden, but what makes the book stand out is the insigh tinto the personality of the narrator, Trond. The novel takes place across the "planes" of time: present day (Trond getting by in his relative isolation, various home-maintenance chores, awkward interactions w/ others, including his estranged daughter), 1948 (when Trond spent a summer working on logging and farming with his father; during this period - the central part of the novel - a young boy was accidentally shot to death his brother and Trond recognizes that his father may be in love with the wife of a neighbor), and 1945 (Trond learns that during the war his father and the wife-of-neighbor were involved with the Resistance). There are many dramatic events, but the novel is saturated in its Scandinavian reticence andgloom; it's amazing, though credible, that Trond accepts his fate and makes few or no inquiries about the disappearance of his father. The father's coldness and selfishness is equally amazing; the most startling section of the novel must be the letter his father writes to the family informing them that he will never return home, in the coldest and most clinical manner. By the end, we feel that we know the narrator quite well and we empathize with his isolation and his loss - but we also feel that there are aspects of his story that he can share w/ no one, that there's much he hasn't told us, or even told himself. He's perhaps the most isolated of literary figures, perhaps alongside Camus' Mersault - odd, in that he spends much of his time reading Dickens, his literary antithesis.

A note on story n current New Yorker, Bedtime Story, by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, who has become a NYer regular: Many aspects of this story drew me in and held my interest, as I particularly like stories that have the scope of a novel yet feel right and complete within the scope of short fiction; Bynum's story follows the course of a a love and marriage from high school through first years of parenthood, opening with the husband's "bedtime story" to their child, a retelling of an encounter - maybe didn't actually happen? - from early years of the marriage. Oddly, though, it feels as if Bynum is groping for her own narrative thread; looking back over the story I think that first section could have been cut or trimmed as it proves extraneous to the more dramatic and personal events to follow. Some quibbles: Wouldn't any woman become immediately suspicious when her partner seems to want them to spend time w/ another woman, his "friend" from the gym? Wouldn't any guy be suspicious when his "friend" calls him late at night to say she'd been robbed and to summon him for help? And why is his race relevant to this story? Quibbles aside, though, there are some nice surprises in this piece; it's worth reading to the end.