Jon Fosse is a Norwegian writer who seems to be having a bit of a day in the North American sun since winning the Nobel Prize a couple years back. He was already well-known outside of North America as he’s the most produced living playwright in Europe. So respected is he in his native land, the Norwegian government has granted him a lifetime stipend for his future output.
Fosse refers to himself as a writer of Mystical Realism (as opposed to Magical Realism). He’s probably most famous for, in many of his best-known works, a lack of full stops and the repetition of very simple language. Though Cormac McCarthy‘s use of punctuation was spare, it does not match Fosse's. For instance, there is not a single period to be found in Septology’s 700 pages. It compares to no other writer I’m familiar with and if forced to create some sort of analogy, I’d probably go to the hypnotic music of Philip Glass. You think it’s the same thing being repeated ad naseum until you allow yourself to be escorted by it and begin to feel the subtle differences make contact with you. It is an eye-opening revelation when it hits you. David Milch once said of this realization, “Oh! This guy’s been fucking walking with me!,” though he was referring to Kierkegaard.
Let me illustrate the repetition with the opening of Boathouse, one of my favorite books by Fosse, written before he ditched the full stops:
I became aware of Fosse after reading Ruth Margalit’s review of Septology, with the most compelling bits being:
Fosse’s writing is bleak, impassive, mournful, circuitous, almost insistently inscrutable. It is also deeply spiritual — and not in the manner of Instagram-friendly New Age aphorisms. …
At times while reading the first two books of Septology, I walked around in a fugue-like state, wondering what it was that I was reading, exactly. A parable? A gospel? A novel bereft of the usual markings of plot, time, and character? The answer appeared to be all of the above, but although I usually balk at anything mystical, the effect was haunting and cumulative. …
Fosse’s interest[ed] in doubling: both the multitudes we each contain — all the roads not taken — and how we grow estranged from ourselves over time.
This doubling is all throughout his work — at least in everything I've read: Septology, Boathouse, Aliss at the Fire, Trilogy, Morning and Evening, A Shining. I'm not talking about doppelgängers, but repeated names and characteristics existing both simultaneously and throughout time, many of the stories becoming ouroboroses of theme and language.
Again, I'll go to David Milch, as I often do, as he is a firm believer in the connectedness of all things. Sort of a panpsychism but not that individual everythings have conscience, but that there is one conscience of which we're all part. I'm not religious but suspect such a belief disagrees with Fosse's Catholicism — though I'm happy to believe that both men are correct and that there is no conflict. (Mickey Newbury once asked:* "Did God make time to keep it all from happening at once?" and James Lee Burke has repeatedly said we're all "in a dream in the mind of God.")
Of course, I am reading Fosse in translation, all by Damien Searls — a man who learned Nynorsk (the language Fosse writes in) specifically to read Fosse. Some of the Fosse I’ve finished I haven’t read myself, but have had it read to me. The master narrator of his work is actor Kåre Conradi. Here he is reading the same Boathouse excerpt as above:
Try that for four and a half hours — or 28 in the case of the seven books that make up Septology! Fosse, especially as read by Conradi, has a way of burrowing into your conscience until, yes, he is walking with you.
*Here’s Bonnie Prince Billy covering that Newbury track:
