Jon Fosse wants to say the unspeakable

Milo Rau, one of Europe’s most acclaimed theater directors, said the theater world in some parts of Europe was in the grip of the ‘Fosse hype’ in the early 2000s. “The theater scene was overwhelmed by its spirituality, minimalism, seriousness and melancholy,” Rau said. Fosse’s plays “felt completely new and out of time,” he added.

Fosse said he drank to meet the demands of a globe-trotting theatrical life, and that alcohol eventually took over. At one point in 2012, he said, he was drinking a bottle of vodka a day and barely eating. He collapsed from alcohol poisoning and had to spend several weeks in a hospital.

When a son drove him home after that forced recovery, Fosse said, he told himself, “It’s enough, Jon,” and he never drank again. Shortly afterwards he also converted to Catholicism. Attending Mass, Fosse said, “can take you somewhere out of yourself, to another place.” The feeling was similar to the one he got while writing – or drinking, he added.

A year after his collapse, Fosse began to be mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize, although he did not become a laureate for another decade. By the time of the announcement, he had long completed “Septology,” the multi-part novel, sometimes romantic, sometimes existential, in which the main character, Asle, a painter, looks back on experiences remarkably similar to those in Fosse’s books. to live.

At one point in the doorway of a novel, which the Nobel committee called Fosse’s “magnum opus,” Asle recalls a childhood accident in which he slipped in a farmyard and severed an artery. In the repetitive style of the book, Asle describes the incident, where he is surrounded by “glittering shiny transparent yellow dust and he is not afraid, he feels something like happiness.”

But then he stops imagining the scene. He can no longer think about that moment, Asle says. “It’s better to put it in my photos as best as possible.”