Juan José Saer ‘The Witness’

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In this already strange situation, the cabin boy faces other adversities. In the absence of women the ambiguity of his juvenile form, a product of his incomplete virility, eventually becomes more appreciable. That which the sailors, in other situations good family men, consider repugnant, seems to them, in the course of the sea crossing, as being more and more natural.***

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The action of Saer’s novel, read in French,  takes place at the very beginning of the 16th century as a Spanish ship, whilst searching the coast of the Americas for a route through to the Indies, and during a seemingly safe survey of the mouth of a river in smaller boats in what appears to be an uninhabited land, is attacked by a group of Indians. All of the survey party except the cabin boy are killed by the Indians who then run off into the jungle at a sustained pace for a full day, carrying the dead sailors and the cabin boy before reaching their village where the dead are cut up, roasted and eaten, followed by several days of drinking to excess (several people die) and then orgies, all of this witnessed by the cabin boy. He then repeatedly, once a year over the time of his stay, re-lives similar events, as hunting parties return with dead captives and a witness before once again repeating the canabalistic events. These witnesses seem to accept and understand what is happening to them and are soon after sent back into the jungle in canoes full of food. He is kept 10 years by the Indians, he has nowhere to go back to, and then one day without warning he is sent of in a canoe and soon after comes across Spanish ships, where it soon becomes clear that he has forgotten his mother tongue:

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To calm them I began to tell them my story but as the story advanced, I could see the sense of wonderment growing on their faces until, after a moment, I realised that I was speaking in the Indians language. I tried then to speak in my mother tongue, realising then that I had forgotten it.***

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Years later towards the end of his life, the now aged witness writes about these events and his later life in an attempt to analyse and understand what had happened to him. This story follows the outline of others, such as The Legend of Tarzan and the double shock of being brought up in another world and then rediscovering ones own “civilised” world and seeing it through new eyes

Were the orgies of the Indians, described in some detail, any worse than his experiences as a cabin boy? Was the sense of belonging to a community such as the Indians not better than his treatment as an orphan in Europe? The narrator then joins a travelling theatre group to tell his story to packed audiences throughout Spain, but he realises that the people did not want to know what really happened, they wanted confirmation of their own ideas and prejudices.

On to the crux of the matter, why he was left alive and what was the role of the witnesses? This is the point that pushes him to write and maybe towards the end pushes us to continue. This was not an easy read, there is a certain amount of repetition and to be fair I was reading Antonio Muñoz Molina in parallel and how can you compete with the beauty of his writing (and excellent translation).

 

First Published in Spanish as  “El Entenado” in 1983 by Folios Ediciones.
Translated into English by Margaret Jull Costa as “The Witness” and published by Serpent’s Tail in 2009
Translated into French by Laure Bataillon as “L’Ancêtre” and published by Flammarion in 1987
*** My translation

Per Petterson ‘Out Stealing Horses’

-People…think they know  you, but they do not, they know about you, for what they are let in on are facts not feelings…..not how what has happened to you and how all the decisions you have made have turned you into who you are

Trond is now an old man,  following his wife’s death he decides to move out from the city to an isolated hut in the countryside. By coincidence he recognises his only neighbour after all these years, Lars, Jon’s brother. And the story of his life bubbles to the surface, how decisions, large or small shape the people we become.

Trond has now become a solitary person, but not an inactive person, a little apprehensive with his choice and living with the shadow of events shaped during his childhood.

-I did not bring a television set out here with me, and I regret it sometimes when the evenings get long, but my idea was that living alone you can soon get stuck to those flickering images and to the chair you will sit on far into the night, and then time merely passes as you let others do the moving.

Two major events in the past are the key to who Trond has become and they are linked by the same seemingly innocuous phrase, the title of the book. Young Trond had gone to spend the summer doing up their country cabin with his father and had made friends with Jon, a young lad of his age living nearby, the book begins with Jon coming to their door early in the morning:

-Are you coming?’ He said. ‘We’re 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.

During their adventure, Trond cannot understand the strange reactions of his friend Jon and we learn of a major personal tragedy is the cause of this, in trying to understand what Trond has heard, his father questions him about their morning and reacts unexpectedly to Trond’s story:

-When you were out this morning, were you with Jon then?
-Yes I said
-What were you doing?
-We were out stealing horses.
-What’s that you say? My father was taken aback.
-Which horses then?
-Barkald’s horses. We weren’t really stealing them. We were just going to ride them. But we call it stealing to make it more exciting.

As the story moves on we learn of the role of Trond’s father during the war, as with many people in this isolated village near the Swedish border, such as Jon’s mother, but not his father, he helped people cross the border from occupied Norway into Sweden. As they worked the escapes their password which he muttered outside of Jon’s parents cabin was of course:

-Are you coming he said we’re going out stealing horses

Obviously heard by the young Jon. One night due to neglect by Jon’s father, he and Jon’s wife were forced to flee to Sweden for the duration. This was the second major event that shaped Trond’s life, his father could never settle down to his previous life after this. Looking back on his life, Trond comments:

-People…think they know  you, but they do not, they know about you, for what they are let in on are facts not feelings…..not how what has happened to you and how all the decisions you have made have turned you into who you are

And I guess this is true for all of us but with a little less drama.
As the book cover says Out Stealing Horses is a poignant and moving tale of a changing perspective on the world, from youthful innocence to the difficult acceptance of betrayal, and of nostalgia for a simpler way of life. 

First published in Norwegian as ‘Ut og stjœle hester’ by Forlaget Oktober in 2003
Translated into English as Out Stealing Horses by Anne Born and published by Vintage in 2006

Jo Nesbo ‘Police’

This book is the tenth in the Harry Hole series, a well written and cleverly pieced together novel including Police ( a number of police officers sadistically murdered), politicians who in the black world described come out ahead (the ‘they’re all corrupt’ vision).