It seems like Alex Shephard didn't do his Who Will Win roundup this year? Anyway, here's what he wrote about Jon Fosse in 2021:

“The Nobel Prize in literature is as European as diesel gas and taking the idea of “Switzerland” seriously. If the Nobel Prize Committee decides to award a luminary of European literature, they will select someone on the above list. Fosse, as ever, remains a hugely deserving candidate, and it has been 10 years since a Scandinavian has won the Nobel Prize in literature. But is the academy aware that Fosse was Karl Ove Knausgaard’s creative writing teacher? If they are, he’s unlikely to survive the blemish. (“Just write! Never revise!” is apparently the mantra in Norwegian creative writing classes.)”

And last year:

“I would personally give the edge to Fosse, 10 years Knausgård’s senior (and his former writing teacher), for his recursive, dreamlike works about people looking at fjords and thinking about all the ways that they—and their families and ancestors and friends and also sometimes people they pass on the street—have fucked up in their lives, specifically in and around fjords. But Fosse has also broken from precedent, daring to write a septology that has little to do with the tradition of authors like C.S. Lewis and J.K. Rowling (whose septologies are about mysterious wizards and Jesus and/or mysterious wizards who might be Jesus) and is instead concerned with the ultimate mysterious wizard: the meaning of life.”
posted by oulipian at 4:24 AM on October 5, 2023 [6 favorites]

The one year Alex Shephard didn't write his prediction article, he guessed correctly (on Twitter so not linking).

Personally, I haven't connected with Fosse's prose works, but I love his plays and poems.
posted by Kattullus at 4:27 AM on October 5, 2023 [4 favorites]

I always like it when a playwright gets recognized. (I know Fosse also writes other things.)

From a New Yorker interview (archive link) last year when the translation of his novel Septology was coming out in the US:

Your writing is wiser, and it knows more than you as a person know. It’s bigger. It’s the gift of all great literature, I think. To me, a way to look at it is to think that love is something very unique and, at the same time, completely universal. That goes for human beings, too. There’s something completely unique and something completely universal to a human being. But, to transform the uniqueness of love into authentic literature, that is necessary to create something worth it.

On edit: whoops, missed that Kattullus already had this interview in the post, but seconding the value of the link I guess!
posted by the primroses were over at 4:49 AM on October 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

interesting, i just preordered the paperback of Septology yesterday without knowing much about him but finding the idea of 600 pages on the meaning of life intriguing for some winter reading.

I do wonder if Cormac McCarthy had survived a little longer if he’d have been in the running. Always seemed like the most likely next american winner to me.
posted by dis_integration at 5:31 AM on October 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

i just preordered the paperback of Septology

The hardcover is the way to go with this book, assuming by paperback you mean the Fitzcaraldo Editions printing (I've yet to see the Giramondo printing). The FE book is poorly laid out with ridiculously wide margins, an extremely tight spine, and weak covers. I found it very discouraging to read.

I'd also recommend avoiding the audiobook, which is poorly read.
posted by dobbs at 6:19 AM on October 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

I tried reading Fosse's Septology, but the religious themes combined with the hypnotically repetitive prose didn't work for me.

In the first book, every 30 pages or so, there are a couple pages of "I think and I think that people who think like that can't have big thoughts about God, and I think about Jesus, how much he loved children, how he said that children were the kingdom of God, that they belonged to the kingdom of God, and that is a beautiful and true thought, I think, so why would they need baptism," etc., etc. At a glance that accounts for most of pages 21-22, most of pages 48-49, and good chunks of pages 78-81, and maybe it gets sparse for a while, but it's back at least a few times in books 3, 5, and 7.

I appreciate that he's influenced by Meister Eckhart though ("no man in this life ever gave up so much that he could not find something else to let go," etc.). Theology isn't something I'm looking for in fiction, but I don't mind that Fosse is getting this recognition.
posted by Wobbuffet at 6:40 AM on October 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

> i just preordered the paperback of Septology

> The hardcover is the way to go with this book

Transit has a paperback coming out on Halloween (🎃). I was not able to find the hardcover edition. Or at least, my local bookstore said it was no longer in stock or available for order (I guess it was a limited run) and to pre-order the paperback.
posted by dis_integration at 7:25 AM on October 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

a way to look at it is to think that love is something very unique and, at the same time, completely universal. That goes for human beings, too. There’s something completely unique and something

am I terrible person for pointing this out? And I suppose I should allow for English not being the man's first language, but even so (and yes, this is maybe my biggest single grammar peeve), unique cannot be qualified and/or contextualized. Something either is unique (singular, one of a kind) or it's not. If you feel compelled to say something is very or completely unique, you're either being needlessly wordy or you really want a different word, or words.

Yes, I am a terrible person.
posted by philip-random at 10:39 AM on October 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

Prescriptivism, boo.

That said, I am just happy Karl Ove Knausgård didn't win. His perpetual presence on the list of predictions mystifies me.
posted by fncll at 10:43 AM on October 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

Prescriptivism, boo.

but it's the Nobel prize for literature.
posted by philip-random at 10:54 AM on October 5, 2023

I always look forward to the annual Kattullus Nobel prize thread.
posted by ersatz at 10:56 AM on October 5, 2023 [4 favorites]

> Something either is unique (singular, one of a kind) or it's not. If you feel compelled to say something is very or completely unique, you're either being needlessly wordy or you really want a different word, or words.

A great deal of 20th century philosophy is concerned with the problem of the particular and the universal. It's not cut and dry. If something was in fact so particular that it could not be considered general in anyway, some might argue that while it might exist, you couldn't even perceive it. I'm an old Hegelian, I'd say they're in a dialectical relationship.
posted by dis_integration at 11:05 AM on October 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

unique cannot be qualified

It can if you give it 110%
posted by Phanx at 11:23 AM on October 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

> "unique cannot be qualified"

Yes, it can.

Anyway, if someone wanted to read Jon Fosse, anyone have a recommendation on where to start? How about Annie Ernaux or Abdulrazak Gurnah?
posted by kyrademon at 11:57 AM on October 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

philip-random: am I terrible person for pointing this out? And I suppose I should allow for English not being the man's first language, but even so (and yes, this is maybe my biggest single grammar peeve), unique cannot be qualified and/or contextualized

Unique has a range of meanings, it can mean “one of something”, as you have it, but it can also mean “characteristic of something” (e.g. her love of the jazz accordion is unique to her) or just simply “rare” (e.g. she’s a unique person). Those meanings can take qualified without anyone having a reasonable objection. I don’t think anyone would be confused if someone said “she’s not completely unique for playing the jazz accordion, but she’s fairly unique in her age group”.

Now, it could be argued that people use qualifiers with “unique” in the meaning “one of something” as a sort of transference between meanings. But I don’t think that’s right either, because after all, no one says “there was very one person in the audience at the jazz accordion concert”, even though people can respond to the question “did she perform the awesome eight minute accordion solo she loves” with “that very one”. So people are clearly capable of distinguishing between meanings.

I think that people conceptualize “unique” in much the same way people conceptualize “alone”. A person can’t be more alone than alone, right? But no one sees a problem with a person being “completely alone” or “very alone”. The phrase “she felt very alone on the stage” wouldn’t trip up any English-speaker. Similarly, uniqueness is a spectrum. Each person is unique, but some people are more unique than others.
posted by Kattullus at 12:02 PM on October 5, 2023 [8 favorites]

kyrademon: Anyway, if someone wanted to read Jon Fosse, anyone have a recommendation on where to start? How about Annie Ernaux or Abdulrazak Gurnah?

I’ve never connected with Fosse’s prose works, but if you can find a staging of one of his plays, which I feel will probably be more common now, I’d absolutely recommend going to a show. I don’t think English translations of his poems have been published in a book, but if you google his name plus poems, you’ll find a great deal online.

Ernaux is relatively easy to get into. I’ve read two of her works, The Years and Exteriors. I’d say the former is a masterwork, and the second great, but it’s slighter. People who love Gurnah tell me to read Paradise, but I’d happily recommend Afterlives myself.
posted by Kattullus at 12:07 PM on October 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

but it's the Nobel prize for literature

These are extemporaneous remarks made in the course of an interview. It has nothing to do with his actual writing.

Even if the man were a native English speaker, this level of pedantry would be a complete waste of time.
posted by Atom Eyes at 1:01 PM on October 5, 2023 [6 favorites]

in conclusion, I am a terrible person
posted by philip-random at 1:05 PM on October 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

HULK BRAIN HURT!! -- SMASH NOW!!
posted by y2karl at 1:26 PM on October 5, 2023

Alex Shephard chimes in: With Jon Fosse’s Win, the Nobel Prize in Literature Is So Back

Fosse’s victory has another silver lining: It means Knausgård almost certainly won’t win the prize until 2030, when he is eight volumes deep into a meticulous study of his experience watching a single soccer game. (The second leg of 2009’s Europa League group stage match between Benfica and AEK Athens. A pretty fun game, to be fair!)
posted by chavenet at 4:13 PM on October 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

On the way back from work today, the most NPRish NPR news story headline ever: "Today was a big day for fans of Norwegian theater."
posted by kozad at 7:25 PM on October 5, 2023 [6 favorites]

Fosse is the first Nobel laureate ever to write in Nynorsk, the minority dialect in Norway compared to Bokmål, used by only around a tenth of the population. In a minority language sense, yay?
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 9:23 PM on October 5, 2023 [4 favorites]

in conclusion, I am a terrible person

But not uniquely so.

I don’t know anything about Fosse nor his work and hadn’t heard of him until this news and following it a thread appeared on r/literature in which a reader was asking for a translation into Norwegian. That seemed like a shitpost, so naturally I opened it to read more. Within I learned that Fosse writes in “Nynorsk” which in some circles is not considered elegant or fit or even Norwegian. The majority of Norwegians employ “Bokmal” instead as their written language and it is a translation to that that the shitposter was asking for. A helpful redditor suggested a Danish translation, as that’s apparently close to Bokmal.

What an amazing and incredible world this is.
posted by notyou at 4:50 AM on October 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

On preview: Shoot, should have read to the end of the thread.
posted by notyou at 4:51 AM on October 6, 2023

I have never read Fosse. There's much to read - excellent.
posted by doctornemo at 5:52 AM on October 6, 2023

> "But not uniquely so."

Well, not very uniquely so.
posted by kyrademon at 5:54 AM on October 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

Not much to contribute, just want to say that I have an online friend who is the Chinese translator for Fosse's novels, and this is probably going to be the closest connection I ever get to Nobel.
posted by of strange foe at 8:59 AM on October 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

That is super cool, of strange foe. Literary translators are amazing.
posted by Bella Donna at 11:40 AM on October 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

if someone wanted to read Jon Fosse, anyone have a recommendation on where to start? How about Annie Ernaux

If you don't want to try Septology due to its length, I'd recommend Trilogy. For Ernaux, I'd suggest The Years.

And I'll add another writer I think deserves more attention: Helen Garner. I've loved everything she's written but would suggest The Children's Bach.
posted by dobbs at 7:57 PM on October 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

> but it's the Nobel prize for literature.

So? Language evolves. There are different registers and codes. Grammar peeves when not directed toward some kind of mismatch of either or both of those is neither productive nor, arguably, accurate. I will argue no further here. Back to Fosse.
posted by fncll at 12:41 PM on October 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

Since this year, the Nobel committee did Fosse Fosse Fosse, I predict that next year the award will go to Martha Graham. (Presumably for Blood Memory.)
posted by kyrademon at 4:14 PM on October 9, 2023