Greetings, writers—
I’m pretty aggressively non-topical in these posts—you get your news elsewhere, obvi—but today I have to talk, ever so briefly, about Norwegian novelist, playwright, and occasional poet Jon Fosse, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature yesterday. A longtime contender1, he was honored this year “for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable.”
Let’s ignore the weird quasi-contradiction of that sentence and focus, for a moment, on what Mr. Fosse said in response to the news, which was to that he was “overwhelmed, and somewhat frightened” by the award. Totally fair. He also noted that, seeing as how there were no more awesome prizes for him to win, “Everything will be downhill from now on.”
I assume he said this with a smile on his face, but I didn’t see the broadcast on Norway’s TV2. Who cares, I love it. He’s like, hedonic treadmill? What’s that? I’m already over it, where is my pen.
Although it should also be noted that Norway, which appreciates its writers more than some countries do (ahem), has given Fosse a lifetime full stipend for his literary efforts, as well as lifetime use of the Grotto, a residence near Oslo’s Royal Palace that previously housed other Norwegian cultural luminaries. So it’s not like he could go very far downhill, even if he wanted to.
I’d never read Fosse, I will admit, but mere hours after the prize was announced, a copy of Morning and Evening appeared on my porch, courtesy of a beloved friend and loyal Good Ideas reader.2 (💙!!) And now I can say that I have read a least a little of him, and that he’s a beautiful writer. You think you don’t want to read a book without any periods in it, but then it turns out that you do. It turns out that you’re utterly spellbound.
Today, three options for writing prompts:
Write a scene/poem/fragment/story in which the phrase “everything will be downhill from now on” is either spoken or implied.
Read the following poem by Fosse. It looks small and simple—there aren’t many words, and most of them are repeated. But it’s deceptively expansive, and those few words actually shift in meaning. (E.g., the first “downwards” feels topographical, while the second feels psychological. And the breath taken in the first line seems like it belongs to a different entity than the breath held in the last line.) Anyway, write scene/poem/fragment/story that uses repetition—and a mountain.
Have fun imitating the style of this passage from Fosse’s Aliss at the Fire. (Interesting only to me: Signe was the name of my great-grandmother, who came to the U.S. from Norway when she was a young woman).
I see Signe lying there on the bench in the room and she’s looking at all the usual things, the old table, the stove, the woodbox, the old paneling on the walls, the big window facing out onto the fjord, she looks at it all without seeing it and everything is as it was before, nothing has changed, but still, everything’s different, she thinks, because since he disappeared and stayed gone nothing is the same anymore, she is just there without being there, the days come, the days go, nights come, nights go, and she goes along with them, moving slowly, without letting anything leave much of a trace or make much of a difference, and does she know what day it is today? she thinks, yes well it must be Thursday, and it’s March, and the year is 2002, yes, she knows that much, but what the date is and so on, no, she doesn’t get that far, and anyway why should she bother? what does it matter anyway? she thinks, no matter what she can still be safe and solid in herself, the way she was before he disappeared, but then it comes back to her, how he disappeared, that Tuesday, in late November, in 1979, and all at once she is back in the emptiness, she thinks, and she looks at the hall door and then it opens and then she sees herself come in and shut the door behind her and then she sees herself walk into the room, stop and stand there and look at the window and then she sees herself see him standing in front of the window and she sees, standing there in the room, that he is standing and looking out into the darkness, with his long black hair, and in his black sweater, the sweater she knit herself and that he almost always wears when it’s cold, he is standing there, she thinks, and he is almost at one with the darkness outside…
Happy writing!
Emily
“I think of the four elder statesmen of Norwegian letters as a bit like the Beatles: Per Petterson is the solid, always dependable Ringo; Dag Solstad is John, the experimentalist, the ideas man; Karl Ove Knausgaard is Paul, the cute one; and Fosse is George, the quiet one, mystical, spiritual, probably the best craftsman of them all,” writes Damion Searles in the Paris Review. Searles, who translated my copy of Morning and Evening, also argues that Fosse is “pure poetry” while Knausgård is “pure prose.”
She was ahead of the curve! She’s been trying to get me to read Fosse for years!
Thanks so much for posting about Jon Fosse. I hadn’t read him either. These two pieces
made me want to read more. What beautiful writing. Especially the simplicity, which is so hard to craft. I felt like I uncovered something special today that I had no idea about.
❤️