JON FOSSE, The Other Name for prose

Story is metaphor for life and life is lived in time” – Robert McKee

Time that very much stills yet flows through the writing of Jon Fosse. A playwright and translator, Norwegian author Jon Fosse has proved his mettle, time and again through exemplary writing whether it was for plays, essays or various novels.

I came across his work for the first time when he was longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2022. His Septology series is one of the most notable works which now has been widely read and appreciated across the globe.

He wrote his first novel, Red, Black, in 1983, followed by the Melancholy series, Aliss at the Fire, and Septology to name a few. Eventually, he started scriptwriting for plays, mastering that skill and how. Some of his expansively scripted plays, as said by him, have been written in a night.

“The Other Name”, “I Is Another” and “A New Name” are the intricately designed pieces of the Septology trilogy, each forming the philosophical & theological extension of the other. The series interweaves the life story of Asle, a staunch, rosary-bearing Catholic, whose thoughts keep meandering from the outside world to the inside. The plotless narrative is more like an assembly of dots, dots for the readers to connect. Pictures created by these dots will be your own creation, which can be colored as you want them to look viz. you want red for love or red for religion, grey for belief or humanity etc.

Just like Septology, Fosse plays with time and his method of continuous narrative in Aliss at the Fire. The ebb & flow of the plot can be measured through the various pawns he lays down on the chessboard. Each move on this chequered board cascades through contemplations about Art, Religion, Silence, Stillness, Darkness, delving deeper and deeper into faith

Author interviews are the best way to understand the thought process behind the book. Out of many authors that I have read, Fosse’s clarity has always intrigued me. Quoting one of his interviews, he says

“To write what I myself have experienced doesn’t interest me at all. I write more to get rid of myself than to express myself. It is the creation of a new universe, characters, moods, a story, a specific way of writing, which is interesting to me. And if I manage to write well, I bring something to this world that wasn’t there before. And that is also completely new to me.”

Fosse’s writing feels nothing less than assembly of poems. The never-ending loop of small sentences leading to longer ones makes for a perfect play area for the author. The engrossing narrative & absence of full stops all across the Septology might just make you forget to breathe once in a while. Hence the claustrophobia of his characters starts resonating with you as a reader.

His writing style has a juxtaposition of repetitive lines with that of fragmented sentences. I think these are his tools to bring out the hauntingness of the text. There is a sense of urgency in his writing & quick shifts from present to past & back that don’t let your attention shift even for a minute.

One of the most appealing aspects of his writing which I feel the common audience will connect to is how beautifully he describes nature and its compartments. In Septology, he has immaculately painted the beautiful Norway and its fjords

In general, talk about Faith, religion and subjective propensity have a high susceptibility of being borderline preachy but his work makes none of it.

“I just keep the mistakes and let them be wrong, because it’s often the mistakes that eventually lead to something right” – from I Is Another

In hindsight Fosse’s writing style might not appeal to all sets of readers. His plethora of work is not easy to understand and sometimes plotless narratives can also get daunting. I think to love and understand his work you need to be in the right frame of mind.

The Nobel Prize for Literature 2023 awarded to him celebrates his imperfect characters and staunch readers

My alma mater was books, a good library…. I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.”

Malcolm X

This quote perfectly sums my past, present and future. Curiosity is to Human as Fickle is to Life. The only constant being Knowledge, which will help you learn, Unlearn and Relearn. Hence I love to read range of books from Fiction to Non Fiction, from Historical Fiction to Autobiographies, from Romance to Real life challenges. I generally post my book reviews on Social media sites (@rendezvouswithbooks) and enjoy a Tome as much as a short story