Read #158

Jon Fosse: Aliss at the Fire (trans Damien Searls)

“…there is something like a yellow sunbeam of despair“

Dear God but this is 65 pages of intense. The kind of book, the kind of writing that demonstrates how fire makes darkness.

It runs over generations, names, time, memory – pulling and pushing at them so that confusion is easily caused and I suspect intentionally. There are few sentence breaks, aside from the speech, and even then it is hard to decipher who said what.

And it all begins when Signe lies down on a bench at home to ponder again what can have happened that dark November night 23 years ago, when her husband Asle went out on the fjord in a small boat during a storm and never came home.

And an empty boat knocked all day against the rocks on the shore.

“…and Brita’s scream fills everything there is, the fjord, the mountain, and Asle doesn’t answer…“

Devastating.