Jon Fosse 'Aliss at the Fire'

Experimental literature is alive and well - in Norway. Jon Fosse's Det er Ales has just been translated into English by Damion Searls, who stated in an interview with Scott Esposito last week that it is Fosse's best novel - visionary was a word he used more than once. He's not kidding. Fosse's minimalist language and very long sentences (the first period came on page 43) are unusual enough, but his subtle shifts in perspective, which are really seamless transitions from one character's inner voice to another's within the same perspective, as though there is only one, a single stream of consciousness occluded by clouds of unknowing, together with his extreme compression of time and starkly mythic topography of fjord and fire together create something weirdly compelling, a sort of modern gnostic document. Potent symbols evocative of pagan ritual burn, glitter and fade across a landscape which is both inner and outer, a hermetic mystery; words like wood, boat, wool, coffin, hair, body, fish, window, boy, flip over in waves of incantatory prose like the flotsam and jetsam their author claims elsewhere to be the essence of his poetry, images which float into sight in the process of writing and create their own meaning. We begin to draw lines between objects in an obscurely imagistic way, as though there is a picture beneath the pictures we are given and we only have to focus or perhaps un-focus our inner eye to see it. It's an encounter with something very rare, even occult, but it takes place in 2002 - or an expanded version of it. Time is layered, braided, or blended completely; in one scene, Signe hangs her coat over the coat of the (ghost?) Aliss who hangs it on the same hook a hundred or so years earlier. It really is a kind of ghost story, a meditation on memory and loss, and the distorting effects of grieving, a grief which can be never-ending and calls into question just who is grieving in the first place. Grief simply is. Perhaps it happens to something rather than someone; perhaps people stitch it into the fabric of time or place.

The only living character, properly speaking, is the middle-aged Signe who has lost her husband Asle and still waits for him in their home by the water, though she knows he is not coming back. Into the contorted space of her memory and longing float the shades of Asle and his ancestors, including that of his great great grandmother Aliss, who burns sheep heads in the fire, who saves her boy from drowning by speaking the name of God, who is powerless to save her grandson Asle from the same fate, or indeed her great great grandson Asle from his. Events are subject to the same ritualistic treatment as words, deaths mirror one another as if ordained, or at least, connected in the same inevitable, unbreakable way that moments are connected, or generations.

It's impossible to isolate one scene or sentence without the feeling of having taken it sacrilegiously out of context, perhaps even killing it. Which is another way of saying, I can't find a quote that conveys what I want to say - no fragment can do justice to the whole. There really aren't any fragments anyway. It's a single, sustained literary gesture, one long sweep of the eye.

Fosse's books and plays are much celebrated in Europe. It's time we knew him better over here, and this beautiful book is the perfect place to start. A swift read at 106 pages, its strange effect lingers like the green spot at the back of the eye after a sunset.