2023-10-05 13:49:34
The Norwegian Jon Fosse, winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize for Literature, is a theater author, but also a novelist and an author of books for young people.
The Norwegian Jon Fosse, crowned with the Nobel Prize for Literature on Friday, is a jack-of-all-trades writer for whom form is generally more important than substance, the unsaid more telling than words.
Novelist, essayist, poet, author of children’s books and above all playwright, Fosse is not easily accessible to the general public. However, he is perhaps the living author whose plays are the most performed in Europe.
Round face, Scandinavian blue eyes, beard and medium-length hair, Jon Fosse is a child of the fjords born 64 years ago on the west coast of Norway. A region beaten by natural elements and of which it has kept the language, “new Norwegian” (nynorsk).
Projections over time
He grew up in a pietist-inspired environment with a Quaker grandfather, both a pacifist and a leftist. A pietism from which the young Fosse distanced himself, preferring to call himself an atheist and play guitar in a group, Rocking Chair, before finally embracing the Catholic faith late in life, in 2013.
After literary studies, he made his debut in 1983 with Rouge, Noir, a novel where a young man settles scores with pietism. The style, marked by numerous projections over time and alternating points of view, will become his trademark.
Followed, among others, The Boathouse (1989), which won him critical esteem, and Melancholia” I and II (1995-96), another major work.
His latest masterstroke, Septologian – seven chapters divided into three volumes – exploits a man’s encounter with another version of himself to raise existential questions with, as always, parsimonious and unpredictable punctuation.
Translated into around fifty languages
Fosse came to the theater almost out of necessity: without regular income, in the early 1990s he agreed to write the beginning of a play, took a liking to it and decided to go all the way (Someone Will Come).
Ultimately, it is this genre that will ensure his international notoriety. After And Never We Will Be Separated in 1994, A Day in Summer, Dream of Autumn and I Am the Wind followed.
Breaking a decade-long hiatus, he surprises himself by reconnecting with the genre in 2021, with the play Sterk Vind (untranslated).
According to his Norwegian publishing house Samlaget, his texts have been translated into around fifty languages and his plays produced more than a thousand times around the world.
Meaningful silences
Freeing himself from classical rules, he ignores the plot, reduced to a strict minimum, and uses a simple and stripped-down language where the key to understanding is in the rhythm, musicality and pauses.
His characters are not very talkative. Their sentences repeat themselves, except for a few minute changes, and remain in suspense. It is the silences which are often heavy with meaning and which make people, even together, remain alone.
“I don’t write characters in the traditional sense of the term. I write about humans,” Fosse confided in 2003 to Le Monde.
In his plays, “the sociological elements are present: unemployment, loneliness, breakdown of families, but the essential is what is between. In the interstices, the fault lines between the characters, between the different elements of the text. It comes more through the silences, by what is not said than by what is said,” he said.
His personal life is strewn with flaws. Married three times, this father of six children had to give up drinking after health problems.
Difficult to assemble parts
Although extremely difficult to stage, his pieces found influential outlets abroad. In 2007, the Daily Telegraph placed him 83rd in a ranking of the 100 living geniuses.
In a country which has produced few authors whose success has crossed borders, except for detective novels, we inevitably associate Fosse with the other great national playwright, Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906).
But he is undoubtedly closer to Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) whom he admires. As in himself, he says he sees in the famous Irishman “a painter for the theater rather than a real author”.
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