Unlike other awards that are characterized by awarding a famous author (such as the Princess of Asturias in Literature) or confirming a list of best-selling books (as is, unfortunately, often the case with our ill-fated Critics’ Prize), the Nobel Prize in Literature stands out for its surprising nature. Over the years, the pools fail and the prize eludes the most prestigious writers, as well as those who boast big sales. Swedish academics prefer to read the works of writers who have traveled for years away from fairs and festivals, and in this way they discover neglected literary regions. Thus, names that are indispensable for our pleasure were included in our reading baggage: South African JM Coetzee, Belarusian Svetlana Aleksiévich, Polish Olga Tokarczuk…
By their high standards of demand (and their taste for the surprising), two types of Nobel Prize winners can be said to alternate: those we all look to to find out who they are and what is published in the journal. He is the author who rewards writers we already want at home, such as Englishman Kazuo Ishiguro of Spanish and Japanese origin and Frenchmen Annie Ernaux and Patrick Modiano. The first lesson is a tribute to our curiosity; second, the validation of our tastes.
Norway’s Jon Fosse (Haugesund, 1959) seems to fall into the category of surprise winners, but in his case the issue is not transparent; Perhaps we think so because of the lack of perspective: only a small part of his extensive work has been translated in our country, but in France he is a highly represented and award-winning author. There is also an incongruity in the attempt to make an account of his work from such a meager example as Mañana y siempre, a hundred-page book that does not belong to the theater, the genre in which he established his prestige.
So no one is looking for the keys to Fosse’s work in this text that recently appeared in Spain, or even in a wide literary profile. All I can offer you is to read (as carefully as you wish) a brief excerpt of his work. It’s the equivalent of dipping your toes into the sea to tell us the temperature of the water.
And what we find when we open the book is a very strange style of repetition, in a syntactical arrangement; It is possible that the Spanish reader may well refer to Thomas Bernhard, but Fosse (less concentrated and obsessive) has in mind the phrase: wraparound psalms from the Bible. As a result, a vivid picture of religiosity comes to life in the background of the story. Puns and verbal effects are also attempted in the service of a somewhat disheveled poem, the language never quite managing to dance. But the combination of both strategies offers a very sensitive prose (displayed in a hyperrealistic way) for special occasions: the gaze of a woman who has just given birth, the first auditions of a newborn baby, the weight of everyday tools loaded with experience… .
The structure of Morning and Afternoon sets the tone and atmosphere of its pages. Fosse shows the first and last days of the life of the same man, a fisherman named Johannes. Although strictly speaking, what really counts here are the hours before birth (when the baby’s body is unconsciously breathing) and the hours after death; It is not clear whether we are witnessing a supernatural transcendence or the final turmoil of the universe. a subjectivity.
At first glance, one might think that Fosse is artificially prolonging the surprise of Johannes dying a bit, but we soon realize that this is not a script change that will leave us speechless. On the contrary, the author expects us to immediately notice what is happening. Its plot is to follow the fisherman’s confusion, the slight agony of feeling that he is dead without realizing that he is dead; It’s like when we realize in the middle of a nightmare that it’s just a dream from which we don’t know how to wake up. above.
The structure of the book builds a bridge between the baby who only cares about people he doesn’t know and the old man who only loves shadows that no longer live in this world. In the middle we see the progression of an ordinary life: work, love, marriage and the chance to become a citizen of a country with social services (this phrase is repeated dozens of times) (“Thank goodness we already have a pension”).
Fosse offers a tour through Johannes’ life in a different temporality, at the mercy of sudden convulsions and sensory disturbances, or if you prefer, a phantasmagorical dance of encounters and disagreements, a territory specific to Angela Thirkell’s Wild Strawberries. , Charles Dickens and the ghosts of Japanese literature.
Fosse’s device, slow and repetitive, obsessed with recreating the cost of saying goodbye to the everyday world, contains moving moments: the final voyage on his friend’s boat, the meeting with the love he could not have, the moments of compensation with him. his wife, the transition in which the consciousness of the story passes from the fisherman to the girl recognizing the corpse, or to the final farewell to ordinary things (“Mother, think, all this, how many times I have seen, how many times I have seen” “There will be such times too”): the brightness of farewell.
But if one feature of this novella stands out, it is that it dares to speak eloquently about the everyday mysteries of existence rather than recreating the first and last days of a life or the complex communication between the living and the dead. The words of a fisherman, a man whom Jesus might have chosen to walk alongside, delicate language stripped of intellectual sophistication.