The Norwegian Jon Fosse (Haugesund, 1959) is the last Nobel Prize winner for Literature. His work includes theatre, poetry and the novel. In the last genre, his characteristic style, very rhythmic, is based on repetitions, sound sensations and the exploration of the mysteries of everyday life. He receives this newspaper, with a slight limp, at the headquarters of his publisher in Oslo, after a snowstorm. When he checks the long list of Nobel Prize winners who have passed through these pages, he asks: “And Harold Pinter wasn’t interviewed?”. “No, once we got to enter his house, but he didn’t receive us.” “I must have been drunk, what fun we had together, when I was still drinking”, he says amused.
What was your childhood like?
I grew up in an area next to a rather famous fjord, the Hardanger. It was a small community, a great place to be a child, we had a very free life. If you grew up by the sea, you will always hear the sound of the waves. Oh, and the enormous darkness in the landscape, the enormous mountains. So I have very strong impressions, which show in my writing. And, of course, that’s where the language comes from. There I learned to speak Nynorsk, the language in which I write.
What kind of language is it and why did you choose it?
It is a rural dialect of Norwegian. At school, they taught me to write it, all the teachers spoke it. It is simply my language. I never thought of switching to the majority language of the country.
I believe his parents were Quakers….
Yes. I come from a small farm that the family has had since the mid-18th century. My father lived, for better or worse, on what the farm could provide. As a young man, he planted many fruit trees, but then, due to the flood of imported fruit, he had to look for another job and ended up running a kind of community store, a colmado where they sold everything you could need in the area of Strandebarm. And my mother was a housewife.
Their teacher made them read aloud, right?
Yes. One day, the teacher asked me to go out on the platform to read, and suddenly I felt that despair had possessed me. I ran out of the classroom and came back a little later. It was my first experience with anxiety. Never since then have I had such a strong feeling.
And did you start writing to calm the anxiety?
Yes, in those years I wrote more and more, I wrote my first novel at 16. But I used to play the guitar a lot, I was part of a band for a few years, but then I stopped playing and even listening to music and started writing more and more. In a way, I try to transport in my writing the rhythm, everything I experienced when playing music.
what was playing
Both the electric guitar in that blues band and the classical guitar. And I even tried to play the violin. I practiced a lot, but I never became a good musician. And I guess that’s why I quit. But, in my writing, I started using all the repetitions that I had been using in music. My books follow a musical pattern, with repetitions and variations.
You are one of the most important playwrights in the world. But he says he only got into theater for the money…
You know, making a living as a writer is not that easy. At first, the options were to spend less money or get a regular job. After studying philosophy and comparative literature for seven years, I worked for about six years at 25%, a quarter-time, as a teacher of creative writing. This is the only job I’ve had in my life. In the early 1990s, I had no fixed income and was asked to write the beginning of a play and a synopsis of the rest for a state aid program for Norwegian theatre, and they paid quite well. It was a kind of contest, a competition. I lost because it is impossible for me to write a synopsis of anything.
And this?
It’s the same as if you were asked to write a synopsis of a piece of music. The very act of asking for it is stupid. Therefore, I continued to write the play that I had started in the test… It was a great experience to use that format, the theatrical one, with the dialogues, and telling the notes what to do or not to do. And a theater in Oslo bought me Someone Will Come, my most performed play in the world, around 150 productions already. I was happy and started writing other works. Within a few years, they began to be translated and produced in several countries. Claude Régy took me to the stage in Paris, Thomas Ostermeier in Berlin…
And why did it stop?
I wrote for about 15 years only theater. It was very tempting, I went to Paris, Salzburg, New York, Tokyo, Shanghai, to see the premieres… But there came a moment when I felt exhausted from that life, I told myself that it was enough. And although it was at the height of my playwriting career, I gave it up and went back to novels and poetry. I first wrote the novel Trilogía and later Septología. Afterwards, I returned punctually to the theater with Yo soy el viento or something else, but much less, and very different. For example, I will never see the functions.
Where do your ideas come from?
Sometimes I feel like what I’m going to write is already written. It’s out there, not inside me. I just have to write it before it disappears.
His literature manages to cover the most everyday events with a transcendence and an intense meaning…
If I write well, I think I manage to create a kind of everyday mystique. But I never planned or researched or anything. I simply sit down and start writing, listening.
Melancholia is narrated by the Norwegian painter Lars Hertervig (1830-1902).
That book destroyed me, when I finished I was extremely tired. ‘Do you really want to write another novel?’, he asked me. Hertervig was a distant relative of mine, he lived in the 19th century and was admitted to an asylum.
There are many painters in his books, not just here.
As a young man, he even painted and was talented. Hertervig made such an impression on me that I couldn’t write about the beauty of his painting, so I thought maybe what I could do was show the other side, the frenzy, narrate how light emerges from darkness. He is one of the painters I feel closest to. Well, what’s more is Mark Rothko, I always try to see his paintings.
And he entered the mind of a madman, turning him into a narrator and reproducing his way of speaking and thinking. Isn’t it dangerous?
Yeah yeah. That’s why I ended up so tired, I didn’t want to write any more novels. I had enough.
In his books there are delusions, hallucinations, ghosts…
Melancolía is a long monologue about love, loss and nostalgia, and it already contains a double reality, all that his frantic mind shows him. There is also something like that in Mañana y tarde, in which I wanted to reflect the two extremes of human life: being born and dying. I tried to write from the perspective of the child being born, but it was impossible. Only a succession of sounds came out that sounded like Finnegans wake. So I decided to write it from the perspective of the father-to-be, and then the time of the child’s death, already an old man.
Trilogy has biblical echoes. It begins with a penniless couple looking for a place to have a child.
It was not my intention. I only noticed the parallel when, in the first interview, I was asked about it. And I, stupid of me, hadn’t fallen for it.
Septología, starring his alter ego Asle, has, in the Spanish edition, a large bottle of wine on the cover. What is alcohol for?
I think it can be very useful in many ways for a writer. It disinhibits, it loosens things that are too stiff, but it also has a very bad side. If you become an addict and end up an alcoholic, it’s very destructive to your health, your writing, your painting, whatever. That’s what happened to me, I ended up drinking too much, and I had to stop drinking. The myth of the drinking artist is not true: even then, when he wrote, he had to be sober, he only drank a drop of red wine, because he had to be a little sentimental without losing the papers.
His character meets himself, splits: one has found God and stopped drinking and the other has not. Religion is a central theme of Septology…
Yes, the religion of the Quakers, the painter’s parents, already appeared in Melancolía. Quakers talk about the inner light, that of God, in each and every human being. It is one of the central beliefs. Another is that they believe in silence. They sit in a circle to summon him, no one says anything. And suddenly one feels an inspiration to say something, and says it. Otherwise, it’s just a silent meeting until the authority of the group decides enough is enough and stands up. This is how they celebrate funerals, weddings and baptisms, silently. Hertervig’s painting is strongly influenced by this concept of inner light. He is the painter of light. I was close to these groups and their way of believing, without being part of them organically, in the eighties.
But then he converted to Catholicism in 2013, when he gave up alcohol.
When I started going to Catholic Mass, I experienced the same peace of Quaker rituals. The liturgical texts are repeated again and again, and the meaning appears clearly. I felt at home because, in the Lutheran tradition, the Eucharist is of very little value, it has almost been left out. I started reading a lot about Catholicism.
Yeah?
I read so much theology that my wife suffered for my sanity.
In Spain there are many Catholics, in Norway it is more strange, isn’t it?
We are perhaps 4000 or 5000, very few, and almost all of us are converts, not by birth. The Protestant Lutheran church dominates here, a very rationalistic way of believing, there is no mystery of faith.
‘Literature saves lives’, you said. In what sense?
In the literal A normal person doesn’t make a living writing, you don’t if you’re integrated. These are people who would have serious problems finding a place in society without the solitude and freedom that being a writer gives them. Mental tensions can be released enormously by writing. I don’t write to express myself, but to escape. And I have noticed that there are many people around me who are having a hard time. In Norway, there are many suicides, and for people in such a fragile state, the intimacy of literature and the companionship and understanding that reading gives can help them endure life. When I was awarded the Nobel, people wrote to me saying that reading me had dissuaded them from committing suicide.
In Septología, it narrates a very similar accident that you suffered when you were 7 years old, right?
Indeed, but in a transformed way. I was very close to death, it’s quite an experience. The sight of blood has been crucial for me. I wouldn’t be a writer if I hadn’t experienced that.
You have a house in the mountains, near Bergen, also in Austria, where your wife is from, and here in Oslo she lives in the king’s gardens. How is it?
The Norwegian State gives the Grotto, a house in the gardens of the royal palace, as a place of residence for an artist for life. I was a little over 50 years old when the composer who occupied it died and they decided to give it to me.
Is there a Spanish writer you admire?
Lorca, which I have rewritten in my own way, making versions of his works. For example, I have been inspired by Bodas de sangre for a work of mine about abortion.