Aliss at the Fire (Norwegian Literature) - Softcover

Fosse, Jon

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1564785734 ISBN 13: 9781564785732

Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press, 2010

Synopsis

From the 2023 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, a haunting masterpiece exploring love, loss, and human fate.

In her old house by the fjord, Signe lies on a bench and sees a vision of herself as she was more than twenty years earlier: standing by the window waiting for her husband Asle, on that terrible late November day when he took his rowboat out onto the water and never returned. Her memories widen out to include their whole life together, and beyond: the bonds of family and the battles with implacable nature stretching back over five generations, to Asle's great-great-grandmother Aliss. In Jon Fosse's vivid, hallucinatory prose, all these moments in time inhabit the same space, and the ghosts of the past collide with those who still live on. 

About this title

About the Author

Jon Fosse is one of Norway's most important contemporary writers, since his 1983 fiction debut he has published prose, poetry and over forty plays. Fosse has been awarded a lifetime stipend by the Norwegian government among countless other accolades, and is one of the most performed living playwrights today. He was the 2023 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. 

Damion Searls is a writer in English and translator of German, French, Dutch, and Norwegian. His translations include work by Ingeborg Bachmann, Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, Christa Wolf; his translation of Hans Keilson's Comedy in a Minor Key was a New York Times Notable Book of 2010 and a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist in Fiction.

Reviews

A drowning is solemnly relived over the generations in Fosse's circuitous, claustrophobic tale. The text begins in 2002, rewinds to late November 1979, then farther back to the initial occurrence on November 17, 1897: a woman stands at a window watching as a storm kicks up, waiting for her husband to return from taking a rowboat out on the fjord. The participants change fluidly and the passage of time is flattened, from the present couple, Signe and Asle, to a mother and child standing at a bonfire on the bay, recognized by Signe and Asle as Asle's great-great-grandmother, Aliss, and her small son, Kristoffer. In a kind of premonition of the later, central tragedy, Kristoffer falls into the water and is rescued by Aliss, though in the next generation, Kristoffer's son, Asle--namesake of Signe's husband--will have a different experience on the water on his seventh birthday. The immense burden of family history weighs heavily on each generation as ghosts, memories, and tragedies collide to effects both confounding and enlightening.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1564785734
• ISBN 13: 9781564785732
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 107