In "Dreams", the fifth volume of the autobiographical novel project "Min Kamp", Karl Ove Knausgard draws a sketchy portrait of his teacher Jon Fosse. Knausgard had moved to Bergen, western Norway, in the summer of 1988 to study at the local academy for the art of writing. Fosse, who had been teaching there since 1987, was 28 at the time. He had already published the novels "Raudt, svart" and "Stengd gitar" as well as a first volume of poetry. Fosse's manner of speaking was "hesitant, full of pauses, nicks, throat clears, snorts, and at times a sudden, deep breath," according to Knausgard. He radiated nervousness and uneasiness, but what Fosse said was filled with a great deal of confidence. As he got to know his students better over time, he told them about his childhood in Strandebarm,a small community on the shore of the Hardangerfjord, and said, according to Knausgard, "at a certain point he might have become a street boy".
Born in September 1959 to a fruit farmer's son, Fosse is indeed filled with the memories of his childhood, the moods of the landscape, the sound of the West Norwegian dialect.
In "The Other Name", "I'm Another" and "A New Name", the three volumes of his novel "Heptalogie", which he has written since 2015 and is more than 1200 pages long in the original edition, he explores in a haunting and deeply personal way the possibilities of another life.
"I always write from the landscape I grew up in," says Jon Fosse.
“I can't escape this landscape and I miss it when I'm here in Oslo or in our apartment in Hainburg an der Donau, where I wrote 'Heptalogie'.
I miss the sea and the mountains, the weather, the rain.” On a sunny January afternoon, Fosse is sitting in the Kaffistova, the restaurant of a hotel in the heart of Oslo, and is talking about the work on his novel, the second volume these days published in German translation.
He wears dark pants, a tight black sweater, a black jacket.
He has a gray beard that is slightly fuzzy on the neck, a pale, round face;
his long gray hair is tied in a ponytail.
Fosse looks like Asle the widowed painter
who in "Heptalogie" meets his doppelganger, another man named Asle, who is also a painter.
Fearing that he would be late, Fosse had arrived at his appointment almost half an hour early and had sat at a table by the window at the back of the restaurant with his back to the wall.
A cup of coffee is in front of him.
“I was a very sensitive child”
He says: “We lived with a view of the fjord, and the way to school also led directly along the water.
I was a very sensitive child in my own way, so the incessant rhythm of the waves had shaped me since I started writing at the age of twelve.” He recounts how, in 2015, at the invitation of Paul Claudel's descendants, he entered Château de Brangues, the château of the French writer, who died in 1955, east of Lyon, where Fosse sat down at his laptop on a hot summer's day and wrote the opening pages of The Other Name, on which Asle wrote in a painting he had just completed "a kind of "luminous darkness", "an invisible light".
He talks about the decision he made shortly before his fiftieth birthday, after almost two decades