Reading matters

'In the Wake' by Per Petterson

Fiction - paperback; Vintage; 202 pages; 2007. (Translated from the Norwegian by Anne Born.)

Judging by the amount of Scandinavian crime fiction hitting our shelves these days, anyone would be forgiven for thinking that this was the only genre Scandinavian writers were capable of creating. Thank goodness, then, for Per Petterson. This Norwegian writer has penned one short-story collection and six novels, although only two have been translated into English (a third, In Siberia, is due out at the end of the year) and they are as far from crime thrillers as you can imagine.

The beautiful, introspective Out Stealing Horses was published to critical acclaim in its native Norway in 2003, but it didn't hit the big time until it was translated into English and scooped the Independent Foreign Prize for Fiction in 2006. Suddenly Norway's best kept literary secret was out of the bag and English-language readers like me clamoured for more. Cue the translation of In the Wake, a novel that predates Out Stealing Horses by three years, but which feels more accomplished and -- if it is possible -- more touching, more painful and more despondent.

'Out Stealing Horses' by Per Petterson

Fiction - paperback; Vintage; 264  pages; 2006. (Translated from the Norwegian  by Anne Born.)

This is a delightful, thought-provoking and ethereal book by an author the Independent describes as "one of Norway's finest living writers". It's a relatively simple story tinged with nostalgia about a 67-year-old man's remembrance of things past and how events in the summer of 1948 shaped the rest of his life.

The narrator, Trond, is a widower who has lost touch with his children. He is living the life of a recluse in an isolated part of Norway with his faithful dog Lyra. By a strange coincidence his only neighbour, another elderly man, whom he stumbles upon by chance, is someone he has not seen since that fateful summer. This brings some painful memories to the surface and forces Trond to recall what happened all those years ago.