Short & Satisfying Book Club: "Morning and Evening" by Jon Fosse

A child who will be named Johannes is born. An old man named Johannes dies. Between these two points, Jon Fosse gives us the details of an entire life, starkly compressed. Beginning with Johannes’s father’s thoughts as his wife goes into labour, and ending with Johannes’s own thoughts as he embarks upon a day in his life when everything is exactly the same, yet totally different, Morning and Evening is a novel concerning the beautiful dream that our lives have meaning.

‘Fosse has a precious ear for the muted whimpers of grief; there are such depths of ache contained in this brief novel. That we begin the journey of dying as soon as we are born may be one of this book’s most effectively dramatized insights, but it succeeds, no less brilliantly, in conveying late-life pain and melancholia; what the days feel like once friends and lovers are gone and we have but our own vanishing selves for company.’
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‘Fosse’s distinctive prose style – a spare, elegant minimalism deftly complicated by stylized, mesmeric repetitions – conjures a suitably haunting atmosphere, a sense of a once familiar world turned uncannily strange…. The result is a work of graceful, spine-tingling beauty.’
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‘Something in the critical self is shed in the process of reading Fosse, only to be replaced by something more primal. A mood. An atmosphere. The sound of words moving on a page.’
— Ruth Margalit, New York Review of Books

‘Damion Searls’ translation is delicate and rhythmic. Fosse is a great novelist of our time, and if you haven’t already discovered him for yourself, this short, sublime novel may be the perfect opportunity.’
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‘[Fosse’s] books … make repeated returns to the edges of descriptive possibility, to the indefinite blind fields of the unsaid. They are poised, that is, ever-wonderingly on the threshold between silent contemplation and our irrepressible need to explain…. The narrative is spirited by the past – as it washes over the present – and bears, at all points, that typically quiet music of Fosse’s prose, the idiom through which he thinks, and which allows an elegant and complex disquisition on memory, loss, solitude, and companionship to take place.’
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Praise for A Shining

‘A Shining can be read in many ways: as a realistic monologue; as a fable; as a Christian-inflected allegory; as a nightmare painstakingly recounted the next morning, the horror of the experience still pulsing under the words, though somewhat mitigated by the small daily miracle of daylight. I think the great splendour of Fosse’s fiction is that it so deeply rejects any singular interpretation; as one reads, the story does not sound a clear singular note, but rather becomes a chord with all the many possible interpretations ringing out at once. This refusal to succumb to the solitary, the stark, the simple, the binary – to insist that complicated things like death and God retain their immense mysteries and contradictions – seems, in this increasingly partisan world of ours, a quietly powerful moral stance.’
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‘Fosse’s prose doesn’t speak so much as witnesses, unfolds, accumulates. It flows like consciousness itself…. This is perhaps why A Shining feels so momentous, even at fewer than 50 pages. You never quite know where you’re going. But it doesn’t matter: you want to follow, to move in step with the rhythm of these words.’
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‘The translation by Damion Searls perfectly judges the pitch and rhythm … producing a natural reading beat.… A Shining is a neat example of Fosse’s gift for portraying porous psychological states, and its publication is perfectly timed for a satisfying Samhain evening read.’
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‘The physical and otherworldly hinterland of A Shining through which Jon Fosse is the guide is at once terrifying and deeply reassuring.’
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‘He touches you so deeply when you read him, and when you have read one work you have to continue…. What is special with him is the closeness in his writing. It touches on the deepest feelings that you have – anxieties, insecurities, questions of life and death – such things that every human being actually confronts from the very beginning. In that sense I think he reaches very far and there is a sort of a universal impact of everything that he writes. And it doesn’t matter if it is drama, poetry or prose – it has the same kind of appeal to this basic humanness.’
— Anders Olsson, Nobel committee

‘A Shining is marked by what is perhaps Fosse’s defining skill: his ability to effortlessly marry the mundane and the sublime. The author is himself a practicing Catholic; he was received into the Church in 2012, and a certain spiritual seriousness is at the heart of his works’ power, even while their spirit everywhere shuns the dogmatic. Expect from Fosse neither the supposedly infallible truths of the pulpit nor Scripture’s resonant cadence. The experience of reading him is of a different order entirely, one more humble, and perhaps as illuminating.’
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‘In this spare tale of disorientation and longing, by the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, a man gets stranded on a back road in a forest and wanders deep into the trees…. Fosse uses fleeting allusions to a world beyond the reach of the narrator to explore some of humanity’s most elusive pursuits, certainty and inviolability among them. His bracingly clear prose imbues the story’s ambiguities with a profundity both revelatory and familiar.’
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Jon Fosse was born in 1959 on the west coast of Norway and is the recipient of countless prestigious prizes, both in his native Norway and abroad. Since his 1983 fiction debut, Raudt, svart [Red, Black], Fosse has written prose, poetry, essays, short stories, children’s books and over forty plays. In 2023, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable’.

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