![]() As they leave the graveyard the man’s parents arrive for a funeral and, as is common with Fosse, time leaps forward by years, in a lingering, longing dance of intergenerational circularity. The drama’s premise is simple, the undercurrents are not: a man and a woman meet in a graveyard and begin an affair – perhaps they knew one another in a past life. Much has changed in Europe and the rest of the world in the intervening 17 years, however. “I can’t help wondering if the cultural gulf between Fosse’s world and our own is too wide,” wrote the Guardian critic when his 1999 play Dream of Autumn had its English language premiere in Dublin in 2006. Photograph: Scanpix Norway/AFP/Getty The play Jon Fosse receiving the Ibsen Prize in 2010. Parallel to this, the narrator is also writing a novel that is an acute observation of every instance of his “restless” existence: a perfect example of the “write, don’t think” maxim as Fosse instructed his students in the late 80s in Bergen, when this book was in the making. ![]() Yet one summer a chance encounter with Knut, now married and relatively successful, will lead to a devastating denouement. His most important achievement lies in his past – the rock band he had with his childhood friend Knut, with whom he has lost contact. The 30-year-old narrator seems to have failed at everything in life – he lives with his mother, is a virtual recluse, doesn’t seem able to do basic things for himself. Published in 1989, The Boathouse is the closest thing Fosse has written to a crime novel. It is typical of Fosse – bleak, with a grand use of a repeated central image, that of blackness, and structured around the grip of ancestral history (the Aliss of the title is Asle’s great-great-great-grandmother), doubles and repeated actions: Asle’s grandfather had the same name as him and met the same fate by drowning. In Fosse’s 2023 novella Aliss at the Fire, an old woman, Signe, lies by the fire at her house next to a fjord, dreaming of herself 20 years earlier and her husband, Asle, who rowed out one day on the water in a storm and never came back.
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