With the literary rentrée we received Morning and Afternoon, a novel by Jon Fosse (Haugesund, 1959) co-edited by Nórdica with De Conatus – whose editors, Silvia Bardelás and Beatriz González, had already opted for the Scandinavian author. Reading this volume of only a hundred pages that appeared in Norway in 2000 has been a good way to begin exploring the narrative of the man who a few days later became the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature. Although, to begin with, Surprising for its simple appearance – a constant characteristic of his style – the text is revealed to be the fruit of an elaborate distillation process.
We meet the protagonist, Johannes, in the opening pages, when he is born, and in the next chapter he is older and his end is near (“from nothing to nothing, that is the course of life”). He gets up one morning and goes out early for a walk, thinking first if he has a coffee and smokes a cigarette, as he usually does (everyday life as the first layer of introspection, another constant). “Today it’s not me,” he points out on that day. The old man confesses, thinks – the verb most present in Fosse’s work -, perceives and wonders. He does it over and over again, like on a loop. He has encapsulated the noise of the world. We only hear what his inner self speaks (“people disappear while things remain”) and some close beings such as his daughter Signe or his friend Peter.
The text flows slowly, serenely, with many repetitions and redundancies, influencing, highlighting, providing small nuances that lead us to know more, to understand what is being debated in that internal circumlocution. The words are chained together like litanies and cause a rhythm, a movement that fluctuates between present and past time. That will be another mark of the recent Nobel’s writing.
The shared metaphors – the journey, the shore, the fishing, the sky… – give the story a mythological air. Candid, profound and philosophical, Fosse sows the pages with questions, with words that always return, that remain in elongated sentences due to the total lack of punctuation – his stylistic option.
All of this appears corrected and augmented in Trilogy (2007-2014), a novel now republished by De Conatus – in three chapters, as the title suggests -, which begins with evangelical reminiscences and evolves towards intrigue and suspense without ever leaving the parallel worlds, those in which there are voices of those who left or doubling of characters, who participate in the story and expand it.
Asle and Alida are a teenage couple. She is about to give birth and their family circumstances – very Dickensian – lead them to leave their hometown and seek luck elsewhere. They will knock on several doors looking for accommodation without success. Things will start to happen – maybe they are just “gossip”. A baby will be born who will be named after his paternal grandfather, Sigvald, a fisherman and violinist. The present will mix with the past, in swings caused by dreams or some memory, a captivating story is completed, where contradiction and paradox make the reader question his position.
The works of Jon Fosse place us in a geography barely hinted at by the presence of the fjord (of Signe, of Inste), where the autumn climate and rain predominate. He places us in localities (Dylgja, Bjorgvin, Barmen, Stranda) and familiarizes us with those names that are transmitted in families and in the author’s books (Asle, Asleik, Ales,…).
The Norwegian writer’s latest work is the monumental Septology, which De Conatus is now publishing in its entirety – he previously published a part – and which will be in bookstores very soon. Divided into seven parts and four books: The Other Name I and II, I is Another III-V and A New Name VI-VII, it stars Asle, a painter, who will monologue over eight hundred pages. He will do it with himself – with his entire existence that includes episodes of childhood and youth -, with his friend Asleik, with his gallery owner Beyer, with his former wife and, especially, with another Asle who is nothing more than, again, a unfolding that embodies another destiny that his life could have had. It all happens in the week before Christmas.
Known elements from the past – names, locations and references – appear on these pages. Anthroponyms return but you have to put the pieces together because you can get confused. Fosse will pour a lot of himself into Asle. The artist, now mature, sports long gray hair tied in a low ponytail, as we have seen the author these days. Two themes linked to his biography are very present here: alcoholism and religion. The character has given up drinking, as Fosse himself did (“I have completely stopped drinking, I drank too much”) and defends that the world is the world because of the existence of God (“the simple fact that we have the word and the concept of God says that God exists. Each part begins with the same scene of the painter in front of a canvas questioning his work and closes it with a Christian prayer. Reading Septology is swimming in Jon Fosse’s ocean, in its tides and moorings, and fully understanding why he has won the Nobel Prize.
