Out Stealing Horses is a story about this guy having memories about his father. He's Norwegian and there are lakes and timber and affairs and stuff.
Yes, I'm aware I'm not doing justice to a book that received rave reviews and is considered one of the top books published since 2000. I don't really care.
It did nothing for me. It's a great book, and there's emotional resonance, a beautiful little theme about pain, crisp scenery, sex, suspense, and war. But I just didn't care.
I found the narrator inconsistent and untrustworthy. In high school, we talked a bit about the untrustworthy narrator after reading The Great Gatsby, though for the life of me, I can't remember why the narrator was untrustworthy. But that's not the point at all. The point, of course, is that I found THIS narrator unreliable and kind of annoying. Perhaps I was the untrustworthy one--maybe I wasn't reading close enough, and so felt that he was holding out on me and misleading me, when really I just wasn't paying attention--but the result is, I begrudged the time I spent with Trond, and I'm glad to be moving on. At last. This is not a long or difficult book. It should not have taken me so long to get through it (over a month).
Since Out Stealing Horses was originally written in Norwegian, I found one of the most interesting parts of the book to be thinking about the translation; choosing "torch" instead of "flashlight" helped to give it a European air. Not knowing anything about the Norwegian language, however, I really wonder what the book was like in its own language. English speakers are blessed/cursed with one of the largest supplies of words in the world. I wonder how that changes our reading experience. Since the English translation was not exactly brimming with fifty cent words, I'm curious as to how complex the language was originally.
In a foreign language with a limited lexicon, what, exactly, makes a novel literary instead of just boring?
some books may have received rave reviews but may not work for us. That's what makes us unique. However, interchanging 'torch'and 'flashlight' would not have had a serious effect on me though I would have gone for the former. Colonized by the British I am prone to use British words as in 'lift' instead of 'elevator' etc
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