Out Stealing Horses

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses Nazi persecution of Jewish people and the accidental death of a child.

“In less than two months’ time this millennium will be finished. There will be festivities and fireworks in the parish I am a part of. I shall not go near any of that. […] I will go to bed and sleep as heavily as it is possible to sleep without being dead, and awake to a new millennium and not let it mean a thing. I am looking forward to that.”

Coming early in the novel, this quotation demonstrates several things about Trond: his desire to be apart from people, his meditations on the passage of time, and his frequent reflections on his own mortality. That he is looking forward to not letting the millennium “mean a thing” suggests a desire to reject the practice of dividing life into neat chronological units of “befores” and “afters.” It also marks the difference in Trond’s perception between loneliness and solitude—as Trond often feels most alone when he is surrounded by people—and illustrates his desire for peace and quiet to sort out the things that do still have meaning to him.

“We were going out stealing horses. That was what he said, standing at the door to the cabin where I was spending the summer with my father. I was fifteen. It was 1948 and one of the first days of July. Three years earlier the Germans had left, but I can’t remember that we talked about them any longer. At least my father did not. He never said anything about the war.” 

The first of three times the novel’s title appears in its narrative, this quote captures the joyful and idealized mood Trond associates with the early days of the summer of 1948, when “stealing horses” is code for a harmless pastime. It establishes the past-tense setting of the novel and Trond’s place in it but also demonstrates the long shadow that the war had cast; though Trond insists that he can’t remember people talking about the war any longer, he knows just how long it has been since the Germans left, and his comment that his father never said anything about the war suggests that Trond finds this strange.