In November 2023, shortly after Jon Fosse had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, I read A Shining, a 48-page story. I expected an immersive experience, but found the repetitive language lifeless and without character. It tested my patience, and the religiosity on display felt crude, irrelevant and simplistic. The 48 pages turned out to be a very slow read, but that was just the beginning.
I had started noticing Fosse’s work before he was awarded the prestigious prize, mainly by reading reviews. Intrigued by commentary on Septology and its radical departure from the norms of punctuation, I put together a small collection and was eager to get started on his work. I began by reading A Shining. It left me stunned and dazed. I needed a pause and turned to other books. In September of this year, I felt I should read Aliss at the Fire, as I was keen to explore more of Fosse’s work. The 74-page length suggested I could finish it in a weekend. It took me nearly three, and I struggled through the book.
Compared to A Shining, Aliss at the Fire has something akin to a storyline. The former has a very simple story: a man drives aimlessly until his car gets stuck at the end of a forest road. He gets out, walks into the dark forest, is lost and has a vision. The latter tells the story of a family, and their pain and losses across generations. Their ‘old house’, the fjord, the darkness, the cold and the rain are as present as the characters, in what, as in A Shining, is a non-story. But do not let reviews tell you that the writing is meditative, reflective, or some other fancy way of storytelling. The writing is excessively repetitive and unimaginative. A passage should illustrate my point:
and as though he was carrying Asle to his baptism Kristoffer goes into the old house where they live and Brita stays standing and then Brita runs her hand through her hair so that it falls back from her forehead and her face is there like an empty sky and then Brita goes home into the old house, where she lives herself, into the old house where she has lived with him for years and years now, into her house, Brita goes into the house that became her own house, she thinks, she is going in to where she is, in her strange clothes and with her long thick black hair Brita is going into her house, into the old house that’s hers and his, she thinks, and so, if someone else has gone into her house, if someone else lives in the old house, then she herself probably can’t go in? if it’s not her house any more? and so can she go inside it?
Aliss at the Fire, p. 60
I understand that the writing aims at an effect, that it reflects the mood and that it can be analysed. At times it adds intensity and immediacy, allowing the reader to become part of the scene and the experience. But when executed mechanically over 74 pages, with themes repeated over and over again, it left me numb, angry and disillusioned. Fosse does not seem to develop stories he wants to tell. In a video on the Booker Prize website, Fosse says:
The writing itself is that which inspires me. I don’t get inspired by this or that outside of writing. When I’m writing, I concentrate completely, more or less, on what I’m working on. One page takes the next in a flow. If I get into that kind of flow, it writes itself more or less.
Jon Fosse in a video.
Fosse writes out the interior of his characters, hoping the reader will become involved and take part in their emotions. The devices he uses are not the common literary devices of narration, suspense, and omniscience. He wants us to be participants in the inner lives of his characters. Therefore, Fosse writes, if this were possible, not as an author, but acts as one of the characters—someone present at the scene, relating to the suffering. Fosse tries to grant the reader the power of insight and hallucinatory vision, just like each character in Aliss at the Fire witnesses the pain and story of the past inhabitants of the ‘old house’ in real visions. I feel the pain of the characters—the boredom, the ageing and the bleakness of their lives. But Fosse’s language is uninspired, uninspiring, dull and cold. I know what you are thinking: this is Fosse’s aim—mission accomplished. As admirable as this might be as a literary endeavour, it fails to capture my attention. If Aliss at the Fire were a book compiled from the diaries of a real-life Asle, Signe, Aliss, Brita, Kristoffer, and the other Asle, it might have been a great read. The author, or the storyteller, are, in my view, absent in Aliss at the Fire. I recognise that this might be Fosse’s definition of a literary author, but that is not enough to encourage me to read more of his work. I say this for a reason: an author is present in these books. Crude as it may feel, someone is compiling these stories, adding the symbolism of the shining light or the fire to the narrative, making connections, and taking us—or attempting to take us—towards and ending, which is my biggest issue with the book under review.
On the final page, one of the female characters—by this point I had given up identifying which one, but presumably it is Signe—lies down to masturbate and sees a range of the other characters in the ‘old house’. I am unsure whether she continues to masturbate while watching the others in a vision, or if she stops. The book ends a couple of paragraphs later:
and she looks at him and then she looks away from him into the emptiness and then she lays both her hands on her stomach and she folds her hands and I hear Signe say
Aliss at the Fire, p. 74
Dear Jesus, help me, you have to help me, you
I understand why Fosse has been awarded various prizes, and why he is important to the literary scene. It is encouraging to see alternative manners of writing published and recognised. However, I perceive Fosse’s writing, insofar as I have read it, mostly as a kind of lazy writing.