Jon Fosse: the passions of a cold Nobel Prize winner

If we're moderately demanding in the realm of print, the proportion of poems that are poems is very small. Plainness abounds, followed by passability. This is logical on a slippery slope, where the reliable can sound similar to the mediocre, and inspired passages glisten with the infrequency of lightning. The two volumes of Jon Fosse 's Complete Poetry are a good example of the ambivalent zone and elevation in which the genre navigates, but even with their ups and downs, they thwart the appearance of any hooded executioner or enraged arsonist.

The strength and weakness of the narrator of the Norwegian Nobel Prize winner 's verses is that he never seems to settle. It's not in his plans. He displays his candor without calculation, occasionally skirts the corny, and within an almost exaggerated simplicity, he raises an anxious, truthful, immovable voice—a voice always planted in the same place—from the 1980s to 2016. They are brief, limited bursts, more sketches of verses than poems, summaries of epiphanic scenes exposed to the elements that the reader must replenish and clothe.

Similar to an elementary school teacher tracing with chalk on a blackboard, Fosse teaches variations in a deliberately limited palette of ubiquitous colors. The ship doesn't soar, but it doesn't taxi either: "An old mailman drives away his own madness/with more patience than anyone ever showed." A certain amount of woodsy mysticism and slight surrealist touches contribute to a gloomy and resigned atmosphere. These are uncomfortable lines (for the person who wrote them and for the person who reads them).

The volatility of light and snow; the favors of rain and wind. Before these pages—populated by children or old people, there are almost no intermediate ages—the reader confirms that in poetry there is no evolution, nor in the same poet. In verse and prose, his is a kind of line that is certainly exciting to write but not always to read, as if subjecting us to the confession of other people's dreams.

If killing time is one of the self-assigned tasks of a certain literature, in his poetry Fosse sought to achieve it by placing himself outside its perimeter. It is in his novels, such as Melancholia , with its late-Romantic tone, where he risks staging slowness to the point of terminal stasis . Laminating the lapses, he opts for an insistent, crushing mode, as if always playing the same number. Fosse refuses to be dismantled and disbelieves in restructuring. His prose has the air of a manuscript that advances through hesitation and obstinacy; the air of a manuscript by a young scribe who set it aside only to revisit those hesitations thirty years later, discovering himself the beneficiary of a resounding international prize.

In other words, Fosse writes as if in a realm without intervening editors. It won't be easy for him to find companionship; more often than not, a reader isn't there to observe how a novelist tries to find rhythm through repetition and saturation, like someone with a problem with restraint and an inability to ellipse. Even if the one doing the hammering is a character and a narrator, can he claim that right? Is a character forgiven—in technical matters—what wouldn't be tolerated in an author?

A first-person singular authorizes reiterations and recurrences, but mere cant or litany doesn't produce music, especially in translation, however excellent it may be (and it is). The decision becomes even more striking in the case of a painter—a rather laconic breed—as the mystery of how to understand, rather than describe, painting (not so much a finished painting as its actions and echoes) hovers. But Fosse's strong suit is extravagance; color must bleed. Hence, his poems and his whites seem less oppressive.

On the first page of the collection of novels entitled Septology , Fosse begins, as in Melancholia , with a nod toward the opening of a novel. Once again, he hopes to thrive on pretense—a painter is mortified by what he himself thinks of his painting, and his teacher—and relies on long passages without full stops: the language folds upon itself and seems to mount a simulacrum of literature.

The compassionate pathos of his narrators doesn't prevent them from reaching winding points, the cranial journeys of a figure capable of shamelessly embarking on a tirade about, for example, baptism. How long has it been since there was—without irony—a character who prays? It bears repeating: the rhapsodic Jon Fosse 's work is risking everything on the extravagance of an ascetic, like a monk who sold his family home for a ridiculous price because he took a vow of poverty.

Complete Poetry , by Jon Fosse. Trans. Cristina Gómez-Baggethun. Sexto Piso, 188 and 296 pages.