I have not yet successfully cracked Jon Fosse’s longer works. He has perfected a kind of circular breathing of prose, repetition becoming mantra, and what that means for me is that there are no pauses or breaks. But I can handle the novellas, just about.

ALISS AT THE FIRE is probably as close as Fosse will ever get to genre. It’s a haunted house story. I’m sure many people, including Fosse himself, would argue about that, and it’s about loss and generational grief. But at its root, it’s about the house and the things that happened there.

A woman lays on a bench in the isolated home her late husband grew up in. She never left it after he vanished, presumed dead, twenty years earlier. She turns her head, and she sees herself, twenty years younger, standing at the window waiting for her husband to come home. And then we inhabit that younger woman as she waits and frets. The older woman remembers herself remembering her day-younger self talking to her husband, seeing her husband leave, and then we inhabit the husband, walking the paths that his family have walked for hundreds of years. And he sees a fire on the shore of the fjord they have lived a short walk from for hundreds of years. The fire shouldn’t be there, not tonight, not in this weather. And it is a pale purple. And there is a figure there, charring off sheep’s heads in the flames (sheep’s heads were peasant food in Norway hundreds of years ago). That is Aliss, his grandmother several great-grandmothers down. Aliss at the fire. Time collapses. We witness family units separated by centuries going about their lives. And the wife now and the husband twenty years ago see them. The men of the family are connected by water, by the fatal fjord that calls to them. The women are connected by this house they marry into, and by loss.

The ending, when it comes, is a sharp, wailing shock that I’m still thinking about.

You’ve got to be in the mood for Fosse. You have to be in the mood to be lost at sea and move like a wave through the text. You have to give up on time passing. If you are, then this experience is remarkable.

ALISS AT THE FIRE, Jon Fosse (UK) (US+)

CONNECTED:

• A SILENT LANGUAGE, Jon Fosse
• A SHINING, Jon Fosse