Jon Fosse - Nobel Literature Prize Winner

 Never heard of him until now. Which says nothing about Mr. Fosse and much about my ignorance of what is going on in the wider world. Thinking there might be others like me – ignorant but curious and willing to learn – I have put together this post.

From The Guardian today: Where to start with: Jon Fosse 

From Lithub:  

Karl Ove Knausgaard on the Writing of Jon Fosse 

Few modern writers could be as far removed from Jon Fosse and the place in which he stands than Michel Houellebecq. Houellebecq’s novels are idea-based, provocative, engaged with the contemporary, disillusioned, smart, misanthropic, and seem somehow to present a face towards the reader. Fosse’s writing contains scarcely an idea, and not a scrap of provocation, the contemporary is toned down or else avoided completely, and although his work often approaches death and explores a kind of existential ground zero, it is never disillusioned and certainly not misanthropic, but full of hope. Fosse’s darkness is always luminous. Moereover, his writing presents no face towards the reader, but is quite open. Houellebecq’s writing reflects everything, throws everything back, in it the reader sees himself and his own time, whereas Fosse’s writing absorbs the reader, is something into which the reader vanishes, like wind in the darkness. These are essential characteristics of Fosse’s work, as the opposite are essential characteristics of Houellebecq’s, and in this the two writers stand at each end of a divide.

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In his first collection, Frå telling via showing til writing (From Telling via Showing to Writing), these enigmatic and untranslatable qualities are tied to the writing itself. Whereas telling connects with the social world, the narrative situation itself, and moreover comprises some element of entertainment, writing, Fosse seems to believe, connects with something else, with that part of our language which perhaps communicates only itself, like a stone or a crack in a wall. The enigmatic is autonomous, and in this one feels Fosse’s language and thinking to be shaped by 1980s literary theory. In his next collection, Gnostiske essays (Gnostic Essays), published ten years later, this enigmatic aspect is still central, though connects now with something quite different: the Divine. The leap from writing and the writer as conceptualized in the theories of literature to the religious concept of the Divine may seem giant, but this is by no means necessarily the case, and in a way Fosse writes here in both instances of exactly the same quality of literature, albeit now approached from a different angle.

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No one has written more perceptively about Jon Fosse’s literature than Lev Tolstoy in War and Peace, in the passage where the main character, Prince Andrei, is moved to tears when listening to a piece of music and endeavours to understand why. He finds reason in the terrible contrast between the illimitable infinity within him and the constraint of his worldly materiality. This contrast, between the infinity within us and the constraints of the external, propels everything Jon Fosse has written.

The Other Name: Septology I-II: Jon Fosse (trans. Damion Searls)

Norwegian writer Jon Fosse has won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature. 

 From Dalkey Archive (Fosse's American publisher):

Author Jon Fosse wins the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2023 

In its citation, the Swedish Committee wrote: “His immense oeuvre written in Norwegian Nynorsk and spanning a variety of genres consists of a wealth of plays, novels, poetry collections, essays, children’s books and translations. While he is today one of the most widely performed playwrights in the world, he has also become increasingly recognised for his prose.”

Dalkey Archive Press is the publisher of several of Jon Fosse’s books in English translation, including the novels Trilogy (translated by May-Brit Akerholt), Morning and Evening (translated by Damion Searls), Aliss at the Fire (translated by Damion Searls), Boathouse (translated by May-Brit Akerholt), Melancholy (translated by Grethe Kvernes and Damion Searls), and Melancholy II (translated by Eric Dickens), and a book of essays, An Angel Walks Through the Stage (translated by May-Brit Akerholt).

From Dalkey Archive Press editorial director Chad Post: “From the first sentence I read of Melancholy on submission twenty years ago, I knew that Fosse was a special author. The intricate structure of his books, the sense of humanity pervasive throughout, and the variety of styles he deploys—from the elliptical in Melancholy and, more recently, Septology to the Beckett-like quality of Trilogy—make it immediately evident that we’re in the presence of a master. It’s also a testament to John O’Brien for taking a chance on this manuscript to publish at Dalkey Archive in 2006, and bringing out six more of his works to great acclaim, always with an eye on future generations who would be reading Fosse for decades to come. Fosse is an author most definitely deserving of the Nobel Prize, and it’s an honor to have acquired his first novel translated into English, to be reissuing his major works, and to witness this moment of appreciation for one of the all-time best.”

Back to The Guardian:

Jon Fosse wins the 2023 Nobel prize in literature

The Nobel prize in literature has been awarded to 64-year-old Norwegian author Jon Fosse “for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable”. His works include the Septology series of novels, Aliss at the Fire, Melancholy and A Shining.

“His huge oeuvre, spanning a variety of genres, comprises about 40 plays and a wealth of novels, poetry collections, essays, children’s books and translations,” said Anders Olsson, chairman of the Nobel committee for literature. “Fosse blends a rootedness in the language and nature of his Norwegian background with artistic techniques in the wake of modernism.”

“I am overwhelmed, and somewhat frightened. I see this as an award to the literature that first and foremost aims to be literature, without other considerations,” Fosse said in a statement.

He also told the Norwegian public broadcaster NRK that he was “surprised but also not” to have won. “I’ve been part of the discussion for 10 years and have more and less tentatively prepared myself that this could happen,” he said.

Jon Fosse: 'The idea of writing another play doesn't give me pleasure' (2014) 

It isn't every playwright who gets a hotel suite named after them, particularly when they're still breathing. But Fosse is no ordinary playwright. One of Norway's most famous writers, he is also perhaps Europe's most-performed living dramatist, translated into 40-odd languages. In 2010, he won the biggest prize in global theatre, the £275,000 Ibsen award, three years after being awarded France's Ordre National du Mérite; last October, before the Nobel prize for literature was awarded, there was a flurry of excitement when it looked like 2013 might be Fosse's year (it turned out to be Alice Munro's instead).

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When we talk about the upcoming UK premiere of 2005's The Dead Dogs, a comfortless tale of a young man marooned inside his mother's flat, Fosse claims not to care what the critics will say, or if his plays – now fully translated into English – will ever find a home on British stages. "I think there's a fear of what is different," he says. "It makes your theatre unique, but sometimes in a stupid way, like your attitude to the World Cup. You're still the champions even if Germany wins, because you invented football."

Anyway, perhaps comprehension isn't really the point. Spare and unyielding, his scripts – more than 30 in all, not to mention a sizeable stack of adaptations, novels and essays – circle obsessively around the perplexities of meaning. His first play, 1995's Someone Is Going to Come, centres on a couple who have just moved into a dilapidated house: she is crippled by the fear that they're not alone, he by jealousy. Their conversation is fractious – intimate, but never quite connecting.

Searching Ball State University's Bracken Library shows it has these materials on and by Fosse. Proving my ignorance is not proof of a writer's obscurity.

sch 10/8