In a new interview, the Norwegian author Jon Fosse speaks with mervatim about his seven-volume one-sentence novel, “Septology,” his conversion to Catholicism, and the idea of “slow prose.”
,” a seven-volume novel written in a single sentence and exemplifying what he has described as his turn to “slow prose.” The narrator of “Septology” is a painter named Asle, a convert to Catholicism, grieving the death of his wife, Ales. The night before Christmas Eve, Asle finds his friend, also a painter named Asle, unconscious in an alley in Bergen, dying of alcohol poisoning.
Yes, it’s a bit like that for me. The man from the foreign department quoted Wittgenstein: What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence. You know this famous twist by Jacques Derrida: “What you cannot say, you have to write.” That’s closer to the way I think about it.is extremely present in your early essays in “An Angel Walks Through the Stage.” One can sense his patterns of thought in many of your plays and novels, particularly around the play of speech and silence.
That place is for listening and for movement, and it’s a very safe place to stay. But it can also be scary, because it’s the route for me to enter the unknown. I have to go to the borders of my mind, and I have to cross these borders. And to cross these borders is frightening if you’re feeling very fragile. I was like that for some years. I simply didn’t dare to write my own things because I was afraid of crossing these borders in myself.
When I grew up, I and the other children around had a very free upbringing. We were allowed to go out on a boat alone when we were seven, eight years old. And some of my best memories from growing up were when I went out on a boat with my father to fish in the afternoon and at night, especially during the summer or early autumn.
Asle thinks something similar about God: “Because God is both a very faraway absence, yes well, being itself, yes, and a very close presence.” In the world we are living in, I feel that the powers are economic powers, which are so strong. They run it all. And you have some forces that are on the other side, and the Church is one of them. And for the church to exist—and the Catholic Church is the strongest one—you have to force Catholicism in a way. The Church is the most important institution, as far as I can see, of anti-capitalist theology. You have literature and art as another institution, but they aren’t as strong as the churches.
In your play “Someone’s Going to Come,” what makes me feel the most uneasy is how intensely and unremittingly its two characters, the Man and Woman, want to be alone with only each other. And that’s the way I can give you a wise answer. It’s in my writing. Your writing is wiser, and it knows more than you as a person know. It’s bigger. It’s the gift of all great literature, I think. To me, a way to look at it is to think that love is something very unique and, at the same time, completely universal. That goes for human beings, too. There’s something completely unique and something completely universal to a human being.
The characters in your plays strike me more as states of being in the world that are inhabitable by anyone. There was a debate at lunch between some of your translators about the idea of slow prose. Specifically, some of them—and I would agree with this—were claiming that nothing about it feels especially slow. Why call it that?
I simply changed my life to a very large degree. I stopped doing readings. And I rarely give interviews now. I say no to ninety per cent of things. There are occasions in which I have to take part. When I’m given a prize here or there, I feel I have to go.But I’m a restless person, so I keep travelling. We have a place in Austria and one in Oslo, and two places here in the western part of Norway. So, I keep travelling between these private places where I have everything I need.
I hear that you’re translating now, while you’re in between novels. I wish more novelists would work as translators. I’ve translated a lot of plays, especially the Greek tragedies by the three masters: Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles. It’s an act of listening to this voice, this ancient voice. And they have very distinct voices, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles. It’s very easy for me to hear and to write that voice in the way I write, in my language, in this time. I love to do that.I don’t know how I ended up reading Murnane. He has not been translated into Norwegian before.
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