The 3 best books by Nobel Prize winner Jon Fosse

Many are the examples of writers who move between genres with the sufficiency that their ingenuity grants them. I remember current cases like those of Andrew Martin o Antonio Soler. But currently few storytellers like Jon fosse go further still, going beyond genres to delve into various manifestations of language as a total communication factor. Until obtaining maximum global recognition with a Nobel Prize in Literature 2023 which it surely deserves according to the unfathomable standards of the academics who grant it.

Because theater has nothing to do with the novel, the essay or the children's story and, nevertheless, Fosse moves through all of this with absolute brilliance, with that solvency of the profession loaded with resources but also with the necessary imagination capable of supporting the registry changes.

Perhaps because of this escape from all possible labels, Fosse was not the most popular of the Norwegian writers until the aforementioned Nobel Prize in 2023. But this did not mean that the recognition of those most knowledgeable in literature with substance that finally supported his candidacy diminished. Because literature is capable of blending into any habitat, as long as its creator is someone as capable as Fosse. There is not much to read in Spain yet about this genius (after this Nobel, everything will skyrocket), but this sample book will help here...

Top 3 Recommended Books by Jon Fosse

Trilogy

Despite everything, Fosse is not an author who exudes erudition in his fiction. He must be for that compensatory taste for children's literature. The point is that in this novel we discover that story with an existentialist but accessible background, to philosophize with the glad pleasure of connecting with sophisticated ideas but presented within our reach. Being human, the condition, has its shadows more than its lights. The point is to admire the beauty when it sparkles in the background of the blackness and trust that everything will pass soon...

Trilogy is a hypnotic book. For Jon Fosse writing is like praying, and for the reader, reading Trilogy means entering an unknown depth. With simple language and a unique narrator, Fosse tells the story of a teenage couple who are going to have a child and who try to survive with nothing in a hostile world.
With this story we understand what it means to have nothing and the ruthless gaze of society, but we also exquisitely relive first love, the experience of starting life with this story we understand what helplessness means and we become aware of the ruthless gaze of society. society, but we also exquisitely relive first love, the experience of starting life. It is an emotional work that, from the darkness of an extreme situation, illuminates us.

The other name

Large serial works such as "In Search of Lost Time" by Proust They must be made up of seven parts. Fosse knows it well, and that task is entrusted with this start of great existential load but with the lightness of a narrator determined to make the transcendent common space.

A contemporary novel written from the most classical literary drive: to look for those aspects of our society that we do not know and that condition us. But above all, Jon Fosse's writing places the reader in a state of meditation, no matter what counts, he just has to let himself be carried away by a voice that takes him deep into human existence.

In that sense it is an exciting read, different from all of them. The book will have a worldwide launch at the Frankfurt Fair precisely because of the general illusion before an author who can represent the great European literature. "The other name" is the first of the seven novels of Septología, the great work of the author that will be released in different volumes until 2023.

The plot revolves around a question that puts us in an existential conflict: What would our life have been like if we had taken another path? "The other name" is the novel that forces us to be aware of the power of our decisions. Asle, the main character, is a famous painter, a widower, who has given up alcohol and seeks peace while remembering his life.

His social relationships are limited to two characters who show his other self, the one that would have been if he had made other decisions: Asle, with the same name, is a painter separated from the world, an alcoholic, Asleik, the neighbor of the farm next door. , is a fisherman and a farmer. All three face the great themes of existence: love, death, faith, the power of nature.

The other name II

We continue to advance in the task of the transformation of the author in his work, in the wonderful process, in the final trick of the novel come to life. Like any great trick, it will be difficult to know if there will finally be seven parts, if Fosse will be the new Proust. In the meantime, let's enjoy the "simple" idea of ​​sending us a new masterpiece sprinkled with everything that a life essentially contains.

It is about the inner life of Asle, a man who is currently a renowned painter who lives alone by the sea and hardly interacts with people. All the books begin with his thinking about a picture he has just painted and end with a repetitive prayer.

In each of these parts we discover what has happened in life to have ended like this. Here, in II, the reader attends two events that marked his childhood. Jon Fosse is able to give us back the lost feeling of when we were children and discovered the world without knowing that it would determine our lives.

Unlike other authors, Fosse declares that he does not write to express himself, but to disappear. That is the difference with the autobiography also in several books of Knausgaard, his student.

Other recommended books by Jon Fosse

Ales by the bonfire

How not to evoke the person watching from the window. Waiting for those who do not arrive and will not arrive. From the peaceful home we all wait or will wait at some point for that being to return. But one-way trips from home always happen as a law of life. It is not just about dying but about abandoning or fleeing, escaping or going out in search of something (not just tobacco). Whoever waits for the return stays inside the house. And from outside the window you can't even imagine the labyrinth inside.

Alone in her old house on the Norwegian coast, Signe looks out the window and sees herself twenty years ago, sitting in front of the same window, waiting for the return of her husband, Asle, during a terrible afternoon at the end of November in the one where he got into his rowboat never to return. In a kind of kaleidoscope, the images of that tragic day are superimposed on visions of the past and their life together, but also with memories that span five generations of a family clan and their constant fight against the harsh nature that surrounds them, until they reach to Ales, Asle's great-great-grandmother.

In Jon Fosse's vivid, hallucinatory prose, all of these moments inhabit the same space, and ghosts from the past collide with the living. Ales by the Campfire is a visionary masterpiece, a haunting exploration of love and loss that is among the most beautiful meditations on marriage and human destiny.

Whiteness

A short novel, perhaps more pressing since recent world-prestigious awards..., (the f*cking Nobel, come on). But that does not mean that it is no longer a recommendable story about that notion of existence in the first person from the human face to circumstances. Loneliness is a mystery today with so many possible stimuli to not rediscover ourselves. The forced reunion, also among the inhospitable and at the hands of an ingenious imaginary that goes from the existential to the physical, becomes an extraordinary experience.

A man drives aimlessly until his car gets stuck at the end of a forest road. It is a late autumn afternoon, there is almost no light and it is starting to snow. Instead of walking back in search of help or staying in the car, recklessly and without really knowing why, the man decides to go into the forest. Inevitably, he gets lost, and the night continues to progress. When exhaustion and cold begin to overcome him, he glimpses a strange glow in the middle of the darkness.

Whiteness is the latest novel by Jon Fosse. The Nobel Prize-winning author draws the reader into an enigmatic, disturbing and hypnotic narrative: a reading as brief as it is intense.

5/5 - (11 votes)

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