Norwegian writer Jon Fosse (64 years old) has become the owner of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature for "his plays and creative works that gave voice to the seemingly unspeakable".
Jon Fosse's works have been translated into more than 40 languages. He has received many prestigious awards during his career as a playwright and novelist.
Portrait of Jon Fosse in 2019 (Photo: Hakon Mosvold Larsen/EPA).
Books for beginners
The powerful and often very short stories in the collection Scenes from a Childhood clearly define Fosse's literary career from 1983 to 2013.
These stories serve as an introduction to the central themes of his work: childhood, memory, family, faith... with a powerful force, a sense of duality and fatalism.
Fragmented, sometimes deliberately simplified, Scenes from a Childhood traces the author's journey from youth to old age.
Some notable works include: Red kiss mark of a letter ; And then my dog will come back to me.
If you only read one book by Jon Fosse
In Fosse's 2023 short novel Aliss at the Fire , Signe lies by the fire at her house by a fjord, dreaming of herself 20 years ago and her husband, Asle, who one day sailed out onto the water in a storm and never returned.
The book is typical of Fosse's writing style - bleak, using a dark, repetitive central image, deployed in a looping structure of ancestral history (the Aliss of the book's title is Asle's great-grandmother); the actions are doubled and repeated (Asle's grandfather shares his name and suffers the same fate of drowning).
A book that has been described as "hypnotic and mysterious".
Cover of the book "The Boathouse" (Photo: Time's Flow Stemmed).
Books for the hurried reader
Published in 1989, The Boathouse is the closest Fosse has come to writing a crime novel.
The 30-year-old narrator seems to have completely failed at life. He lives with his mother, is a recluse, and seems unable to do even basic things for himself. His most important achievement is in the past, the rock band he built with his childhood friend Knut - with whom he has lost contact.
One summer, a chance encounter with Knut - now married and relatively successful - will lead to a devastating end.
In parallel, the narrator is also writing a novel that is a keen observation of every instance of his "restless" existence: a perfect example of the "just write, don't think" maxim that Fosse instructed his students in the late 80s.
Read a play by Fosse
"I can't help but wonder whether the cultural gap between Fosse's world and ours isn't too wide," wrote The Guardian 's critic when Fosse's 1999 play Dream of Autumn had its English-language premiere in Dublin in 2006.
Much has changed in Europe and the rest of the world in the past 17 years. The premise of the play is simple: a man and a woman meet in a graveyard and begin an affair - perhaps they knew each other in a past life.
As they leave the cemetery, the man's parents arrive for the funeral, and as Fosse often writes, time passes by, year by year, in a longing, lingering dance of intergenerational cycles.
The book is worth the reader's patience.
In Melancholy I and II , Fosse takes readers deep into the "tortured" mind of 19th-century landscape painter Lars Hertervig—who died in poverty in 1902, at the age of 70.
His life was marred by hallucinations and delusions, making his paintings seem dreamy, yet also fantastic.
Hertervig first suffered a psychotic break while a student at art school in Düsseldorf, Germany. The novels (originally published separately but now in a single volume) explore what it means to be an artist.
Melancholy I details the hauntings, anxieties, and final breakdown of young Hertervig on one terrible day.
Melancholy II serves as a powerful conclusion, with different narrative perspectives—including that of a fictional biographer—years after Hertervig's death.
3 volumes of the book series "Septology I-VII" (Photo: The New York Times).
Masterpiece
The seven books in Fosse's Septology I-VII series (now divided into three volumes: The other name , I is another , and A new name ) revolve around Asle, an aging artist living in remote southwestern Norway.
Like Fosse, Asle wrestles with time, art and self. It is an extraordinary work about existential crisis, about amnesia and the persistent doubles, real or imagined. The life lived and the life that could have been lived, in the person of another shadow.
The books carry suspense and tension presented seamlessly, without pause, so that the reader feels like he is living Asle's life.
Septology is also a work of deep religious belief, in which a man, an artist and above all, a human being finally completes a journey: "It is certain that only when things are darkest, really darkest, do you see the light".
Jon Fosse was born in Haugesund, Norway in 1959. His first novel - Raudt, svart ( Red, Black ) - was published in 1983. In 1989, he received critical acclaim for his novel Naustet ( The Boathouse ).
He then went on to write his first play in 1992 - Nokon kjem til å kome ( Someone Will Come ). In 1994, the play Og aldri skal vi skiljast was performed at the National Theatre in Bergen.
Fosse composed in Nynorsk (also known as New Norwegian). This is one of two standard varieties of Norwegian, spoken by about 27% of the population.
He is the most performed living playwright in Europe, having been translated into 40 languages. A hotel in Oslo, Norway, has a suite named after him.
In addition to writing plays and novels, Jon Fosse is also a translator.
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