Norwegian fiction -- 21st century. |
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Fiction | FOSSE | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2023
A child who will be named Johannes is born. An old man named Johannes dies. Between these two points, Jon Fosse gives us the details of an entire life, starkly compressed. Beginning with Johannes's father's thoughts as his wife goes into labor, and ending with Johannes's own thoughts as he embarks upon a day in his life when everything is exactly the same, yet totally different, Morning and Evening is a novel concerning the beautiful dream that our lives have meaning.
Author Notes
Called the new Ibsen" and heralded throughout Europe, Jon Fosse is one of contemporary Norwegian literature's most important writers. He has published some thirty books of fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction. In 2000, his novel Melancholy won the Melsom Prize, and Fosse was awarded a lifetime stipend from the Norwegian government for his future literary efforts. Damion Searls has translated twenty-five books from German, French, Norwegian, and Dutch. He is the recipient of Guggenheim, NEA, and Cullman Center fellowships and the author of a book of short stories, What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going ."
Topic:
Scandinavian culture |
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this dreamlike novel, Fosse (Melancholy II), a celebrated Norwegian writer and author of more than 30 books, draws readers into a disorienting work that seamlessly oscillates between its parts. The book is divided into two compact yet deeply moving accounts of a life: in the first section, a father awaits the birth of his son, Johannes, and contemplates his son's future as a fisherman; in the second, an elderly man, also named Johannes (which may or may not be the same person), experiences his final living hours. This section, which takes up a majority of the novel, puts into question what is real and what is a hallucination, as the book follows the elderly Johannes through a museum of the life he's lived: selling crabs at the quay, reminiscing with his old friend Pete, and meeting young Erna, the woman who will become his wife. Indeed, the moments throughout the novel are simple, quotidian, yet Fosse's pared down, circuitous, and rhythmic prose skillfully guides readers through past and present. In this short, gripping novel, Fosse composes a hypnotic meditation on life and death. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Guardian Review
Few writers working today capture the liminality of life as viscerally as the Norwegian 2023 Nobel prize winner Jon Fosse, and in Morning and Evening, his newly republished 2000 novella (elegantly translated by Damion Searls), we follow one person's passage from womb to Earth, and from Earth to the afterlife, in a near seamless progression. This, then, is not a novel that describes a life; it is a fable about the very beginning and end of a life - a metaphysical ghost story. The two-part book opens with a woman delivering her second child in a house on the island of Holmen. Olai, the father whose perspective we inhabit, waits anxiously in the kitchen. Could both baby and mother die? No, "God surely doesn't want that", but then Olai has "never doubted that Satan rules this world as much as the good Lord does". As in his seven-volume masterpiece Septology (2019), Fosse's prose is suffused with mysticism, and a more personal and nuanced theism. There was no doubt in Olai's mind that God exists, but he "has never fully believed that He is all-powerful and all-knowing like they say, the pious people". The good Lord does not rule all and decide everything. On that day, however, He prevails. The mother survives. The child comes into the world alive and healthy. Olai names him Johannes, after his father, and decides that he will be a fisherman like himself. The second part, chiefly told from Johannes's point of view, chronicles the eerie hours after he wakes up one morning, late in his old age. Johannes is a now retired fisherman. His wife, Erna, is long dead. His mornings are "sad and lonely". Johannes makes coffee. He steps out of the house and everything he beholds seems different somehow. He meets his dead neighbour, and good friend Peter, and they go fishing. Johannes later bumps into his daughter Signe and "is seized with deep despair, because Signe cannot see him or hear him". At the tale's close, Peter accompanies Johannes to a place where nothing hurts and "everything you love is there". Fosse has a precious ear for the muted whimpers of grief; there are such depths of ache contained in this brief novel. That we begin the journey of dying as soon as we are born may be one of this book's most effectively dramatised insights, but it succeeds, no less brilliantly, in conveying late-life pain and melancholia; what the days feel like once friends and lovers are gone and we have but our own vanishing selves for company.
Kirkus Review
A fisherman confronts his life, loves, and mortality in this elliptical, somber novella. The veteran Norwegian novelist Fosse (Aliss at the Fire, 2010, etc.) has a knack for compressing an entire lifetime into a few key moments in a few dozen pages. This book, echoing its title's evocation of birth and death, opens with the birth of Johannes, an event described in run-on language that captures his father's anxiety and mother's exhaustion ("What a good strong boy Johannes yes and to stay in this stay here where nothing else Johannes will be a fisherman like his father"). The prose becomes less abstract in a longer second section that captures Johannes, who indeed became a fisherman, in his old age. But the mood is still unsettled in ways that suggest a ghost story: A widower, he steps out one morning contemplating his long life, seven children, and friendship with Peter, with whom he takes a portentous trip out into a nearby bay. Whether the instability has to do with Johannes' weakened state or something more metaphysical is a question Fosse leaves largely open to the reader; he weaves in mentions of superstitions and questions of God's existence not so much to deliver direct comments on them but to suggest the ways our thinking flows uncertainly around them. Johannes' recollections of a young girlfriend, [69] his late wife, [75] and caretaker daughter, Signe, are tender but unromanticFosse's poetic prose implies that the things we love are just out of our grasps. (One paragraph is a riff on whether Signe actually sees him while approaching him.) [89] While Fosse's writing is easy to admireJohannes is beautifully depictedit's also easy to anticipate the grim place the story is moving toward. A brief yet dense contemplative sketch weighted with spiritual touches. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
More hot water Olai, says the old midwife Anna Don't just stand there in the doorway, she says No, sorry, Olai says and he feels a heat and a chill spread all across his skin and make it prickle and he feels a joy move through all of him and force its way out through his eyes, as tears, as he hurries into the kitchen and over to the stove and starts to scoop steaming hot water into a wooden bowl, hot water like this yes that's what she needs, yes, Olai thinks, and he scoops more hot water into the bowl and he hears Anna the midwife say that's probably enough, yes, that should be enough, she says and Olai looks up and there is Anna the old midwife standing next to him and she takes the bowl I can take it in myself, I'll do it, says the old midwife Anna and then a muffled scream comes from the room and Olai looks the old midwife Anna in the eye and he nods at her and is that a little smile on his mouth as he stands there Not much longer now, the old midwife Anna says If it's a boy we'll name him Johannes, Olai says We'll see, she says Johannes, yes, Olai says Like my father, he says Yes, that's a good name, the old midwife Anna says and another scream comes from the room, louder now Patience, Olai, says the old midwife Anna Patience, she says Do you hear me? she says Be patient, she says You're a fisherman, you know how womenfolk don't belong in the boat, right? she says Uh huh, Olai says It's the same for menfolk here, do you know what would happen? the old midwife Anna says Yes, bad luck, Olai says Exactly, bad luck, yes, the old midwife Anna says and Olai sees Anna the old midwife go straight to the door of the room and she is holding the bowl of hot water in front of her with outstretched arms and then Anna the old midwife stops in front of the door to the room and she turns around to face Olai Don't just stand there, the old midwife Anna says and that scares Olai, can just standing here cause bad luck unintentionally? no that can't be what she meant, and will something go wrong now, with Marta, the woman he loves and honors and respects so much, his beloved, his wife, now will something, no, it can't Close the kitchen door Olai and sit down on your chair, the old midwife Anna says and Olai sits down at one end of the kitchen table and he puts his elbows on the table and he holds his head in his hands and it's good he took Magda to his brother's today, Olai thinks, when he went to get Anna the old midwife he rowed around to his brother's with Magda first and he didn't know if that was the right thing to do, because she's almost a grown woman, Magda, the years go by so fast, but Marta asked him to, when it was time and he was going to row out to get Anna the old midwife he had to take Magda with him so that she could stay with his brother during the birth, she was still too young to learn too exactly what awaited her as a grown woman, Marta had said, and he had to do what she told him to do, of course, even if he would actually have liked to have Magda at home now, she's such a smart and sensible girl, has been for as long as he can remember, good at everything she does, he ended up with a good daughter, Olai thinks, but then it didn't seem like the Lord God would grant them more children, Marta wasn't with child again and the years went by and eventually they resigned themselves to not having any more children, that was just how it was, that was their fate they said and they thanked the Lord God for having given them Magda because if they hadn't had even her, no, it would have been sad and lonely for them here on the island of Holmen where they lived, in the house he had built himself, his brothers and neighbors had helped of course but he had done most of the work himself, and when he'd proposed to Marta he already had Holmen, he had bought it for a small sum and thought it all out, where their house should be built, he had thought of that, it had to be sheltered from the wind and the storms, where the boat house and landing should be, he had thought of that too, he needed those too didn't he, and the first thing he built was the landing, in a calm bay facing inland, sheltered from the wind and storms from the sea to the west of Holmen, yes, and then he built the house, not so very big and not all that nice maybe but it was good enough and now, now Marta was lying in the room there about to give him a son at last, now little Johannes was about to be born, he was sure of it, Olai thought, sitting there at the end of the kitchen table, on his chair, his head propped up in his hands, as long as nothing goes wrong, as long as Marta has a good birth, brings the child into the world, as long as the child little Johannes doesn't stay inside Marta's belly and neither survives, little Johannes or Marta, as long as what happened to his mother that terrible day doesn't happen now, to Marta, no, he can't bear to think about it, Olai thinks, because they've been so good together, Olai and Marta, they loved each other from the very first moment, Olai thinks, but now? will Marta be taken from him now? Excerpted from Morning and Evening by Jon Fosse All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.