Norwegian Literature

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2023 Jon Fosse said farewell to theory early in his career, choosing poetry, fiction, and drama as his mediums of choice. Here, however, in a selection from his two books of essays, we see just how incisive a critic and memoirist he can be. Not only including a generous portion of Fosse's writing on literature and theater--including the irresistable "Thomas Bernhard and His Grandfather"--this collection also includes such personal essays such as "My Dear New Norwegian," "Old Houses," and "He Who Didn't Want to Become a Teacher."

Tor Ulven is one of the most renowned Norwegian authors of the twentieth century, beginning his career writing poetry and ending it with unclassifiable explorations of the possibilities of prose, reminiscent of writers such as Ingeborg Bachmann and Peter Handke. Replacement, his only novel, published two years before Ulven's suicide, is a miniature symphony, wherein the perspectives of unrelated characters are united into what seems a single narrative voice: each personality, directing the book in turn; each replacing its predecessor and forming another link in a chain leading nowhere. These people reminisce, reflect, observe, and talk to themselves; each stuck in their respective traps, each dreaming of escape. A masterpiece of compression and confession, Replacement dramatizes the tension between the concrete realities we think we cannot alter, and our interior lives, where we feel anything might still be possible.

The second volume in Stig Saeterbakken's loosely connected "S Trilogy" Self-Control moves from the dark portrait of codependent marriage featured in the acclaimed Siamese to a world of solitary loneliness and repression. A middle-aged man, Andreas Feldt, feeling that he is unable to communicate with his adult daughter over the course of a friendly lunch, announces on an inexplicable whim that he is going to get a divorce. Though his daughter is initially shocked, she quickly assimilates this information and all returns to normal. Faced with this virtual invisibility-for no matter what actions he takes, the world seems to take no notice-Andreas is cut adrift from the certainties of his life and forced to navigate through a society where it seems virtually everyone is only one loss of self-control away from an explosion of dissatisfaction and rage.

In her old house by the fjord, Signe lies on a bench and sees a vision of herself as she was more than twenty years earlier: standing by the window waiting for her husband Asle, on that terrible late November day when he took his rowboat out onto the water and never returned. Her memories widen out to include their whole life together, and beyond: the bonds of one family and their battles with implacable nature stretching back over five generations, to Asle's great-great- grandmother Aliss. In Jon Fosse's vivid, hallucinatory prose, all these moments in time inhabit the same space, and the ghosts of the past collide with those who still live on. Aliss at the Fire is a haunting exploration of love, ranking among the greatest meditations on marriage and loss.