Nobel prize-winning author Jon Fosse on giving up alcohol and converting to Catholicism

The award of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Jon Fosse could not have been more deserved. Over 40 prolific years he has written more than 40 plays, as well as acclaimed novels, essays, children’s books, poetry and a libretto. His masterpiece, Septology, was published between 2019 and 2021. This is not an artist living off past hits.

In the few weeks since the Nobel announcement, the outline of his biography has begun to set like quick drying cement: he gave up alcohol and converted to Catholicism; he writes in the minority Norwegian language of Nynorsk; he is among Europe’s most performed living playwrights yet still gets described as “little known” by the English-speaking media. But with an enormous body of work across multiple forms, and a style that rewards patient, slow reading and rereading, Fosse is a challenge for those looking to get up to speed quickly. These are books you need to let sink in before revisiting. There isn’t an elevator ride long enough in which to pitch them.

His subject matter – birth, death, love, loneliness – is that of literary seriousness, but his books remain accessible and are not weighed down by abstraction. The characters in Fosse’s novels are not alpha types; there are no extroverts here. Though they are often taciturn, self-effacing and stoic, his characters’ stories evoke life as it is recognised and lived by us all.

Fosse is a master of the short novel; books like Aliss at the Fire, Morning and Evening, and Boathouse are capsules of what make him so special: his acute psychological insight; his mastery of transitions in mood, time and perspective; and, most of all, his attuned sense of rhythm – there is a steady reading beat coded into his words, by which the thought processes of reader and character synchronise in shared moments of realisation.

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Septology, though, is his greatest work. Originally published in three volumes in Damion Searl’s sublime translation, it is an 800-page single-sentence novel about an ageing painter, Asle, living in an isolated house. Asle is a widower with a small circle of friends and acquaintances, including his doppelganger, a drunken artist who shares his name and whose life is a cautionary counterfactual of what Asle might have become had he not found God and given up alcohol. The parallels with Fosse’s life invite autobiographical comparisons, but Fosse is adamant that he does not write about himself; rather, he writes to get away from himself.

Septology is, quite simply, one of the greatest novels of our time.

I speak to Fosse a couple of weeks after the Nobel announcement. He is genial, candid and polite, his long white hair pulled back into a ponytail, his round Geppetto glasses perched on his nose. I begin by asking how the prize is sitting with him so far. “In a way I don’t think I will get used to it, and I’m not sure I want to to get used to it. I prefer to stay as my old self, not think of myself walking around as a Nobel laureate. I don’t think I’ll have much problem keeping this distance from the Nobel – I’ll just keep writing in the normal way.”

Having been tipped for the award for years – at one stage Ladbrokes suspended betting on him – he has previously spoken about the wisdom of awarding it to older writers, when they are beyond the point of it influencing them. Fosse, who recently turned 64, felt the timing of the prize suited him. “It was the right time. If I received it 10 years ago it would have been hard to write a book like Septology. I thought people would hate Septology, and if you have received the Nobel you don’t want people to start hating you. I’ll keep on writing and translating – that’s my way of life. I will never compete with myself. I won’t try to write Septology again.”

The announcement referred to the way his work “gives voice to the unsayable”. What did he think the Nobel committee meant by that? “In a way, it’s impossible to talk about the most important things in life in a direct way. Let’s say love, for example: it becomes a cliche; same with death. But if you can manage to say something real about them that isn’t cliched, then you are saying something unsayable. That’s the art of writing, the secret of it: you are saying things that cannot be said any other way than the way it’s said in that piece of writing. Literature and poetry should say what cannot be said. This famous saying by Derrida – what you cannot say, you should write – that makes sense to me.”

The Nobel committee also cited the influence of Beckett on his work, and Fosse has translated The Dead, by James Joyce, into Nynorsk. “There might well be an Irish influence in a lot of my writing, I think,” he says. “I lived one winter when I was rather young in Galway, in Spiddal. There was just darkness and waves, and in front of the house was a graveyard. I felt a connection to Ireland. I come from the western part of Norway – there’s been a close connection between Ireland and this part of Norway since the Vikings, and there are many similarities in the folk music. We are connected to the Celtic tradition, even the way people look – there are many red-haired ladies along the coast here.”

But the connection goes beyond the Vikings. “I’ve been a huge admirer of Samuel Beckett since I was in my teens, and of course I’ve read Joyce a lot. In my opinion the best writers in the world come from either Ireland or Austria – two rather small Catholic countries.”

I try to write as true as I possibly can. As beautifully as I possibly can – these are old standards

—  Jon Fosse

About 10 years ago Fosse gave up alcohol and converted to Catholicism – I observe that it’s more usual for Irish writers to do the opposite. “I loved to drink,” he confesses. “I preferred Irish whiskey, by the way – Jameson, which was the favourite of Beckett too. I started to drink a lot, even in the morning, and I stopped eating. One day I collapsed and had to be hospitalised, but I survived. So I thought, That’s enough. I had to stop drinking and stop travelling. I’m a rather private and shy person, so to manage all this I drank. I covered myself in whiskey. It was okay so long as I controlled my drinking, but when alcohol started controlling me it became impossible to keep on living like that. It would have meant my death, for sure.”

It was around this time that Fosse converted to Catholicism. He is open about his faith, which permeates his work. “I left the Norwegian church at 16, but I’ve been a kind of believer since the mid-1980s. There were of course many things that it was hard for me to accept in Catholicism, but not in the Mass – the Mass is peace. I decided not to convert but became a close supporter and took part in the Quaker meetings in Bergen. At the time I was thinking – and, in a way, I still think – as a Quaker: that you can hear God the closest in the silences – again we return to the unsayable. And this concept of the inner light – God being inside each and every being – is still central to my belief. Before then I was a typical Marxist and atheist in the 1970s.

What changed his mind? “It was my own writing – where does it come from? Or how to explain, for example, the music of Bach – how to explain it in a material way? Impossible, impossible – there must be a spiritual dimension to life, and so I use the word ‘God’ in relating to it.”

I mention that the way he writes about faith is so directly experiential that I wondered whether he had ever had a profound spiritual moment, an experience of gnosis. “At the age of seven I was close to dying, because of an accident, and I had this outside view of myself. I saw myself as a shimmering light that was almost beautiful; there was a great happiness there. I was sure I was seeing my house for the last time. It was a very strong experience for a seven-year-old boy. I think that experience became fundamental to me as a writer – even as a person. But the Lutheran Church has nothing to do with the insight or gnosis this experience gave me. That’s why I left the Norwegian church. There is more space for the mystery of faith in the Catholic tradition than in the Lutheran tradition. And then, at around age 30, I had, something like a vision – now we are talking about the unsayable really! It was like I saw through everything and I felt like I understood everything. A very strong experience of gnosis: this closeness of God and distance from God at the same time.”

In his novel Melancholy, Fosse wrote about Lars Hertervig, sometimes called the Norwegian Van Gogh. A troubled mind but a gifted painter, Hertervig was a Quaker and, as Fosse writes him, is ridiculed by his fellow painters for his beliefs. Was Fosse reticent about writing so openly about his own faith, given that the literary world is so secular? “To write well I have to write in a true way,” he says. “I try to write as true as I possibly can. As beautifully as I possibly can – these are old standards. When I wrote Septology I was quite sure it would be very badly received just because Asle was a believer and a Catholic. I was sure they would deny the book, but who cares – I have to write what I have to write. That’s something I learned from when my first novel was published and it got a lot of bad reviews. I decided to stick to what I knew. But if you think that way about bad reviews, in my logic you have to think the same way about good reviews, success and all of that. That is especially important now that I have received the Nobel.”

[ The Irish signatory to the US constitution who was also a slave-owner ]

Though Septology is rooted in Norway and its landscape, Fosse wrote it in his apartment in Hainburg, near Vienna. Did he need to be away from Western Norway to see it more clearly? “For seven years we mainly lived there, while my wife was taking her PhD in Bratislava. Honestly, I don’t think I could have managed to have written Septology in Norway. I love to live in Hainburg because no one knows me there. I would start working at five in the morning and write until nine. I think I took some four years to complete it all. There was peace and quiet in that small, beautiful medieval town. Haydn used to sing in the church there.”

I ask about how Septology evolved – had Fosse planned it out? “When I start writing I don’t know anything about what I’m going to write. I just start writing, and it develops from there. But at a certain point I have this feeling that what I’m writing is already written somewhere out there and it’s ready. All I have to do is get it down. Often I have to search for it a bit – to get at that already-written text.”

Though Fosse has a huge body of work that is internationally recognised, he hasn’t always had a high profile in the anglophone world. His plays have not been widely staged in English-speaking countries, and some reviews have been lukewarm, even bemused. His fiction, however, has been consistently well received, even if somewhat under the radar. He speaks warmly of the late John O’Brien at Dalkey Archive, the first press to publish him in English translation. “Dalkey published my work with great enthusiasm but didn’t do much to promote the books, just published them. They did get good reviews, though. John O’Brien and I were friends – he was a great man. Then my agent took me to Fitzcarraldo, which led to a huge change in how my work was viewed in terms of getting reviews, listed for prizes and so on. I went from my plays being badly received to my literature being very well received. I don’t quite understand it.”

I put it to him that his work may be challenging to translate. “Damion [Searls] was the first who translated my prose into English, along with a Norwegian translator [Grethe Kvernes]. Damion learned Norwegian by translating Melancholy. I think a literary musicality is needed to translate me well, and Damion for sure has that. If you just translate it in an unrhythmical or unmusical way, then it doesn’t work – you need to somehow transfer the music into the new language.”

The last really great writer I read was Thomas Bernhard, and it’s often said that I’m influenced by him because of my use of repetition, but that’s not true

—  Jon Fosse

Fosse also taught creative writing for about six years; among his students was the celebrated writer of autofiction Karl Ove Knausgård, who has recounted how Fosse once crossed out all but one word of a piece he had written. “I still remember Karl Ove well from the year I was his teacher. We had a good time together. I have only good memories. I’ve always felt that I cannot write something I have experienced directly – it becomes nothing. It needs a kind of transformation to get the unity of form and transcending force. When I was teaching Karl Ove I told him that you cannot write about your own life – but then he did just the opposite. But for something to become a kind of literature you still need a degree of transformation, even if you call it autofiction.”

I ask about his own reading tastes. “It can take many years before I find something I really like. Dag Solstad was also mentioned as a possible winner of the Nobel. He has written some great novels. The last really great writer I read was Thomas Bernhard, and it’s often said that I’m influenced by him because of my use of repetition, but that’s not true – I wrote that way in the 1980s but didn’t read him until the 1990s. When I read him I felt like I had found a friend. We must think in a similar way. He is very aggressive, but I’m not aggressive, so we are very different in mentality.”

[ Jon Fosse interview with Belinda McKeon from 2005 ]

My overall impression of Fosse is of a writer, a person, in flow. His faith is a living part of him from which he sources seemingly inexhaustible inspiration. The fact that he has produced his greatest writing so recently, and so deep into his career, bodes well for his post-Nobel output. Though a decorated writer, he retains a healthy outsider perspective: the world of the Nobel Prize is something to dip into but not draw from. There is a quiet humility to his writing, which seems true of the man also. Perhaps this is because his imagination, like that of Asle in Septology, admits the coexistence of the life he has lived and the many alternative lives he might have lived, or lost.

Septology, by Jon Fosse, is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions