A drowning is solemnly relived over the generations in Fosse's circuitous, claustrophobic tale. The text begins in 2002, rewinds to late November 1979, then farther back to the initial occurrence on November 17, 1897: a woman stands at a window watching as a storm kicks up, waiting for her husband to return from taking a rowboat out on the fjord. The participants change fluidly and the passage of time is flattened, from the present couple, Signe and Asle, to a mother and child standing at a bonfire on the bay, recognized by Signe and Asle as Asle's great-great-grandmother, Aliss, and her small son, Kristoffer. In a kind of premonition of the later, central tragedy, Kristoffer falls into the water and is rescued by Aliss, though in the next generation, Kristoffer's son, Asle--namesake of Signe's husband--will have a different experience on the water on his seventh birthday. The immense burden of family history weighs heavily on each generation as ghosts, memories, and tragedies collide to effects both confounding and enlightening. (Sept.)
Fosse . . . has been compared to Ibsen and to Beckett, and it is easy to see his work as Ibsen stripped down to its emotional essentials. But it is much more. For one thing, it has a fierce poetic simplicity.
What he writes is so simple and so deep at the same time. He has a restlessness, a tension in his narrative style, and he writes about situations everyone feels involved in, no matter where in the world they are.
Slim, mournful tale of loss and memory in a coastal Norwegian town, first published in Norway in 2003.
The novel opens with a series of shifts in perspective, time and identity that hint at the experimentation that follows. We immediately meet Signe, an aging woman living alone near a fjord. The story is set in 2002, but Signe is soon thinking back to 1979 and the day her husband, Asle, died while boating in the waters. In time the reader will hear the inner thoughts of not just Signe but also Asle and numerous other ancestors, going as far back as his great-great-great grandmother Aliss. Fosse's style is hypnotically repetitive; he'll often describe an object or feeling three or four different ways before moving on. This two-steps-forward-one-step-back approach can be off-putting, but Fosse has such command over his run-on sentences that they gain a musical quality that makes them easy to submit to. ("[T]he darkness is as heavy as he is himself, he thinks, and the darkness is dense and thick, now it is one single darkness, a play of blackness," he writes in a typical riff.) His focus on words comes at the expense of any formal plot, though there are a handful of turning points in the story. We learn how Asle, in an urge to find solitude and to challenge himself, braved the fjord in a storm, and how his grandfather, also named Asle, met a similar fate. This doubling of names, experiences and emotions adds to the hypnotic, eerie quality of the novel, which is ultimately a testament to the indomitability of family, even while it experiences tragic losses. Fosse drives the point home by stressing elemental imagery: water, fire, blood, shelter, earth. The novel doesn't resolve, exactly, but by the end it's clear why Signe is so compelled to look into her past.
A somber but poetic and quietly engaging love story. Fun fact: Fosse has a lifetime stipend from the Norwegian government to produce literary works.
‘Jon Fosse is a major European writer.’
— Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of My Struggle
‘The Beckett of the twenty-first century.’
— Le Monde
‘Jon Fosse has managed, like few others, to carve out a literary form of his own.’
— Nordic Council Literary Prize
‘It is some measure of Fosse’s talents that he manages to weave such a compelling narrative from a largely static setting ... Nothing really happens and yet there is something quietly dramatic about Fosse's meandering and rhythmic prose, aided by Damion Searls's limber translation, which has a strangely mesmerising effect. ... [A]n intense reading experience.’
— Lucy Popescu, Independent
‘Fosse carefully captures the contradictions…It is hard not to marvel at what peace and sorrow he fits into a single thought…’
— George Berridge, TLS
‘A drowning is solemnly relived over the generations in Fosse's circuitous, claustrophobic tale. ... The immense burden of family history weighs heavily on each generation as ghosts, memories, and tragedies collide to effects both confounding and enlightening.’
— Publishers Weekly
‘Prose doesn’t have hooks, and Fosse’s incantations are as unexcerptable as Philip Glass symphonies or Béla Tarr tracking shots.... On it goes, building layer upon layer of past and present, ancestors and loved ones, until you are immersed in that world and the prose conjures luminous glory flashing past like Blakean angels. Maybe it is convincing to say that Fosse is the only writer whose book has made me weep with emotion as I translated it.’
— Damion Searls, Paris Review
‘Like Faulkner’s best works, Aliss at the Fire is about the inescapability of the past and how history reverberates mysteriously across generations. Through voices and narratives that are constantly interrupting and interfering with one another, Fosse captures the grief—and love—that can never be put into words.’
— Alex Shepherd, The Atlantic
‘It is becoming increasingly difficult to find any Norwegian author who can equal Jon Fosse.’
— Tom Egil Hverven, NRK
