A Silent Language — WINNER OF THE 2023 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE E-Book

Jon Fosse

• Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 29

Beschreibung

'If there's any metaphor I would use for the act of writing, it would have to be listening,' says Jon Fosse in A Silent Language, the lecture he delivered after being awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature. When he writes, Fosse explains, he listens for texts that exist somewhere outside of himself in order to transcribe them before they disappear. With reverence and humility, Fosse traces his relationship to writing and celebrates the capacity of language to embrace the mystery, complexity and existential uncertainty of the human experience. 'It is only in the silence that you can hear God's voice,' he says, offering a key to his beloved works of drama and fiction. 'Maybe.'

Leseprobe

23‘Jon Fosse is a major European writer.’

— Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of My Struggle

‘The Beckett of the twenty-first century.’

— Le Monde

‘Fosse has been compared to Ibsen and to Beckett, and it is easy to see his work as Ibsen stripped down to its emotional essentials. But it is much more. For one thing, it has a fierce poetic simplicity.’

— New York Times

‘Jon Fosse has managed, like few others, to carve out a literary form of his own.’

— Nordic Council Literature Prize

‘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 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

‘We are in the presence of rare literary greatness. It is for this greatness that the Swedish Academy has justly awarded Jon Fosse the Nobel Prize.’

— Paul Binding, TLS

‘Searls is to Fosse what Anthea Bell is to W. G. Sebald, the best possible intermediary.’

— Blake Morrison, London Review of Books 4

Praise for Septology

‘It ties 2666 by Roberto Bolaño as my favourite book from the twenty-first century.… What I read was nothing less than a desperate prayer made radiant by sudden spikes of ecstatic beauty.’

— Lauren Groff, Literary Hub

‘Fosse has written a strange mystical moebius strip of a novel, in which an artist struggles with faith and loneliness, and watches himself, or versions of himself, fall away into the lower depths. The social world seems distant and foggy in this profound, existential narrative.’

— Hari Kunzru, author of Red Pill

‘I hesitate to compare the experience of reading these works to the act of meditation. But that is the closest I can come to describing how 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

‘Having read the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse’s Septology, an extraordinary seven-novel sequence about an old man’s recursive reckoning with the braided realities of God, art, identity, family life and human life itself, I’ve come into awe and reverence myself for idiosyncratic forms of immense metaphysical fortitude.’

— Randy Boyagoda, New York Times

‘Fosse intuitively – and with great artistry – conveys … a sense of wonder at the unfathomable miracle of life, even in its bleakest and loneliest moments.’

— Bryan Karetnyk, Financial Times 5

‘The entire septet seems to take place in a state of limbo…. Though Fosse has largely done away with punctuation altogether, opting instead for sudden line breaks, his dense, sinuous prose is never convoluted, and its effect is mesmerizing.’

— Johanna Elster Hanson, TLS

‘The translation by Damion Searls is deserving of special recognition. His rendering of this remarkable single run-on sentence over three volumes is flawless. The rhythms, the shifts in pace, the nuances in tone are all conveyed with masterful understatement. The Septology