TEV GIVEAWAY: OUT STEALING HORSES

Per Petterson's magisterial Out Stealing Horses garnered no shortage of praise last year, culminating with its winning the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.  John Banville, writing in the New York Review of Books called it "A subtle, richly wrought, and tough-minded novel, one that Knut Hamsun himself would not have spurned."  The Hamsun angle seems irresistible, as it shows up again the New York Times Book Review:

We imagine we’ve seen this: Trond Sander, an Oslo professional who has recently lost his wife and sister, hopes to cure his loneliness by a plunge into solitude; nothing dramatic, he wants to pension out and make a few changes. Scandinavians differentiate between loneliness and solitude as a matter of course. But Trond, insinuating at times, but colloquial and close to one’s ear, tells a candid story so concretely that the reader has to live it out. “I have been lucky,” he says of his life, while acknowledging that he has always longed to be alone. Has the death of his wife liberated him? He says only, “I lost interest in talking to people.” He will indeed learn to talk, alone, in the middle of a train of thought when “the difference between talking and not talking is slowly wiped out.” Reflecting upon his move to the country, he says, “I had put myself in an impossible situation.” He sleeps poorly because in the quiet, the past presses in upon him and it is disturbing. The millennium is nigh but he expects it to mean nothing. While the fireworks are elsewhere, he will get drunk and listen to Billie Holiday on his record player. We accept that cultivated people turn up in such places, though Americans tend to view them as Edward Dahlberg described the conventional view of Thoreau, “as a kind of cranky male sibyl, a crabbed and catarrhal water sprite of our woodland culture.” Trond is no Thoreau — he’s more like us than other Scandinavian protagonists including Knut Hamsun’s Lt. Glahn or Halldor Laxness’s Bjartur — but his efforts require peace and quiet.

We're delighted to offer a copy of this extraordinary book to a lucky reader, so time to do that thing you all do so well:  Drop us an email, subject line "GOTTA HAMSUN" and please include your full mailing address.  If you've won during the last six months, you'll need to sit this one out.  We'll take your entries until 8 p.m. PST and the Random Number Generator swings into swift and merciless action.  Until then!

UPDATE: Congratulations to our winner Allan Reeder of Cambridge, MA.