December is here and the book harvest sings its last verse. I can clearly see that on my mail shelf, where it used to pour in with press copies of new releases, while now only the occasional book trickles in. The time has come to sort and nominate, choose favorites and find out what we should suggest for Christmas presents. Enormous improvements must be made on the reading front in order to cover the book year 2023 by the time the new one takes effect. In this letter, I write a little about the process of nominations, I share a favorite painting with a reading motif and I take you to bed as I discovered a whole new side of the Nobel laureate. No, Fosse then! I blushed hard to myself when I read one of Jon Fosse’s early novels recently. There appeared a surprising amount of puling. This was not the Fosse I associated with quiet nature poetry, Latin prayer phrases in “The Septology”, or terse lines in “The Zone”. Who ARE you, Jon Fosse? EARLY FOSSE: Advertisement for the debut novel “Raudt, svart” from 1985 Photo: Samlaget When I became aware of Fosse in the 90s, it was as a world-renowned playwright, who traveled the world for premieres of his own plays and was particularly cultivated in France and Germany . He was notorious for his terse dialogue and long pauses. Then Fosse returned to prose and delivered both the “Andvake” trilogy and “Septology”. I threw myself at Fossevogna and fell flat on my face. After Fosse’s conversion to Catholicism, there have been multiple interpretations of his texts as religious, as bearers of mystery and God’s light. In his young years, however, the westerner was in strong opposition to everything divine, we can hear him tell in the TV portrait “Det som ikk kan seiast” or in the podcast Bokpod with the talented Hallgeir Opedal. The young Fosse was a bit of a Marxist and a bit of an anarchist, subscribed to Gateavisa and despised the places of worship he knew from childhood. When Fosse was announced as a Nobel Prize winner, my roommate strolled down to the stall and picked up his Fosse books from the VGS era, some worn paperbacks of the early novels. They thought he was the coolest. I was skeptical. I found the titles annoying and the covers uninviting. I’ve never understood what closed guitar really means. Photo: Samlaget But as I will be the presenter on news’s Fosse Ord for Ord broadcast, I gave in. Now I have to read up! First surprise: There were lots of full stops here! Fosse has become notorious for his aversion to full stops, not least in the “Septology”, which is 1248 pages WITHOUT A SINGLE FULL POINT. When the Nobel Prize was announced, @osol was quick to post this “picture” of Jon Fosse’s special Mac keyboard on X/Twitter: HINT: Which key is missing here? Photo: Øyvind Solstad, @osol på X In Fosse’s second novel “Stengd gitar” from 1985, there is still a period, but what is missing here is a capital letter after the period. Already on the first page I am hooked. A young woman goes out with the trash (boset, as it says in Nynorsk) and the door slams shut. Inside, her one-year-old lies crying. The young mother rushes off to get help, but only gets further and further away from her child. While she takes the bus into the center of Bergen to meet her brother, we learn more and more about who the young mother is. Fosse’s storytelling technique reminds me of the effect you can see on car wheels when they drive so fast forward that it looks like they are going backwards. The words move in circles of repetition that go both forward and backward in time. I have hardly ever experienced the likes of an engine in a story. The more we get to know the girl, the darker the story becomes. First, some drugs come into the picture. Admittedly, it takes some time before I understand what it is about, because the Nynorsk dictionary does not have entries for 80s drug slang such as galar, shillum and syrepis. The girl falls for a guy who plays in a band, so there we have the rock in place. And then comes the sex. The book is mostly written in the first person from the girl’s point of view, and she is not shy about talking about the dick in her mouth and the finger in her pussy. VINTAGE SEX WORDS: “Socking” which you can read about in “Stengd gitar” is what young people today call a BJ. Photo: Jon Fosse/Samlaget / news And this is where my inner image of the Jon Fosse I have met and talked about poetry with completely crashes, and therefore I feel a little embarrassed. But the language fits perfectly with the environment he depicts, of people at the bottom of the social ladder in a winter-cold Bergen on 13 December, long before trendy bars and cool electronics took over the city. It felt like a modernist version of Amalie Skram’s “Karen’s Christmas”, for those of you who have read the INCREDIBLY sad short story in Norwegian class. I didn’t put the book down until the last page, well past midnight. I was saved late at early Fosse, but now I talk to people at the top of my lungs about how cool “Stengd guitar” is. NEW REPRINT: It has long been difficult to get hold of Fosse’s early novels, but now they have been reissued in a blood-fresh Nobel Prize-winning edition. Photo: news Here is one of the advantages of going into a major authorship. You think you know what it’s all about, but then there are many great surprises in store. We are rushing towards the Nobel award ceremony next weekend, and I learn something new about Fosse’s books every day. We’re booking fun guests for the minute-by-minute broadcast, and rumor has it that the House of Literature has ordered a kind of wedding cake to celebrate Fosse, so it’s going to be a party! Hope you will stop by during our 40 hour live broadcast, from Bergen, Oslo and Stockholm. Picture of the week A person reading is a favorite motif in classical art, but what are we looking at? In the wonderful exhibition of Harriet Backer’s paintings that opened at the National Museum this autumn, this is one of the pictures: “By lamplight”, 1890 Photo: Harriet Backer / KODE I have always liked Backer’s art. Maybe because she likes blue and so do I. Her most famous picture is called “Blue interior”, but this one, called “By lamplight”, is far bluer and just as beautiful. It was satisfying to finally see this painting for real. From a distance it feels as if the kerosene lamp in the picture lit up the museum room. Up close, we could almost feel the fabric of the curtain and feel the heat from the oven. While her friend Kitty Kielland painted large, open moorland landscapes from Jæren, Harriet mostly stayed indoors. She wanted to capture the human being as part of the interior, we learn at the exhibition. When I look at the picture, I see a woman’s body in a room, while her thoughts are in a completely different place, perhaps in a desert landscape in the Middle East, depicted in the Bible, which was the reading for many at the time. Have lost their grip on foreign countries this year The year is coming to an end, and books are to be selected and awarded, the Litteraturgjängen in news reads Norwegian 2023 novels until it bleeds out of the island in order to choose the six nominees for the Lytternes novel prize. I usually follow the big English-language prizes with argus eyes, because there I always find great reading experiences and new favourites. (Douglas Stuart, Ian McEwan, Colson Whitehead, Jennifer Egan and Cormac McCarthy, to name a few.) This year both the Booker Prize and the National Book Award have gone off without much interest on my part. The Booker Prize distinguished itself this year by nominating relatively unknown authors. The same applies to the New York Times’ selection of the 10 best books of the year. BOOKER NOMINEES: Only new names for me this year Photo: Booker Prize I hadn’t heard of a single one of them, so maybe it was too demanding to read up? Perhaps one becomes a bit myopic when we have a Nobel Prize winner to celebrate in our own country? Anyway, I need your help here. Have you read any of this year’s foreign award nominees, and if so, what do you recommend? Let me know at [email protected], so I can read at Christmas and let me know here in Bokbrevet! Thank you for now, I hope to see you on Saturday, when we have the Fosse broadcast from the literature house in Oslo, otherwise we will talk in two weeks, in the next Bokbrev. Then we have to talk a little about Christmas presents, I think. All the best, Siss
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Bokbrevet #25 I didn’t know that Jon Fosse was so rock – news Culture and entertainment
