Morning and Evening

July 27, 2015
In this dreamlike novel, Fosse (Melancholy II), a celebrated Norwegian writer and author of more than 30 books, draws readers into a disorienting work that seamlessly oscillates between its parts. The book is divided into two compact yet deeply moving accounts of a life: in the first section, a father awaits the birth of his son, Johannes, and contemplates his son’s future as a fisherman; in the second, an elderly man, also named Johannes (which may or may not be the same person), experiences his final living hours. This section, which takes up a majority of the novel, puts into question what is real and what is a hallucination, as the book follows the elderly Johannes through a museum of the life he’s lived: selling crabs at the quay, reminiscing with his old friend Pete, and meeting young Erna, the woman who will become his wife. Indeed, the moments throughout the novel are simple, quotidian, yet Fosse’s pared down, circuitous, and rhythmic prose skillfully guides readers through past and present. In this short, gripping novel, Fosse composes a hypnotic meditation on life and death.

July 1, 2015
A fisherman confronts his life, loves, and mortality in this elliptical, somber novella. The veteran Norwegian novelist Fosse (Aliss at the Fire, 2010, etc.) has a knack for compressing an entire lifetime into a few key moments in a few dozen pages. This book, echoing its title's evocation of birth and death, opens with the birth of Johannes, an event described in run-on language that captures his father's anxiety and mother's exhaustion ("What a good strong boy Johannes yes and to stay in this stay here where nothing else Johannes will be a fisherman like his father"). The prose becomes less abstract in a longer second section that captures Johannes, who indeed became a fisherman, in his old age. But the mood is still unsettled in ways that suggest a ghost story: A widower, he steps out one morning contemplating his long life, seven children, and friendship with Peter, with whom he takes a portentous trip out into a nearby bay. Whether the instability has to do with Johannes' weakened state or something more metaphysical is a question Fosse leaves largely open to the reader; he weaves in mentions of superstitions and questions of God's existence not so much to deliver direct comments on them but to suggest the ways our thinking flows uncertainly around them. Johannes' recollections of a young girlfriend, [69] his late wife, [75] and caretaker daughter, Signe, are tender but unromantic-Fosse's poetic prose implies that the things we love are just out of our grasps. (One paragraph is a riff on whether Signe actually sees him while approaching him.) [89] While Fosse's writing is easy to admire-Johannes is beautifully depicted-it's also easy to anticipate the grim place the story is moving toward. A brief yet dense contemplative sketch weighted with spiritual touches.

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