A child who will be named Johannes is born. An old man named Johannes dies. Between these two points, Jon Fosse gives us the details of an entire life, starkly compressed. Beginning with Johannes’s father’s thoughts as his wife goes into labour, and ending with Johannes’s own thoughts as he embarks upon a day in his life when everything is exactly the same, yet totally different, Morning and Evening is a novel concerning the beautiful dream that our lives have meaning.
Morning and Evening
Translated by Damion Searls
French paperback with flaps, 104 pages
Published 7 November 2024
Morning and Evening
Translated by Damion Searls
More hot water, Olai, says the old midwife Anna
Don’t just stand there in the doorway, she says
No, sorry, Olai says
and he feels a heat and a chill spread all across his skin and make it prickle and he feels a joy move through all of him and force its way out through his eyes, as tears, as he hurries into the kitchen and over to the stove and starts to scoop steaming hot water into a wooden bowl, hot water like this yes that’s what she needs, yes, Olai thinks, and he scoops more hot water into the bowl and he hears Anna the midwife say that’s probably enough, yes, that should be enough, she says and Olai looks up and there is Anna the old midwife standing next to him and she takes the bowl
I can take it in myself, I’ll do it, says the old midwife Anna
and then a muffled scream comes from the room and Olai looks the old midwife Anna in the eye and he nods at her and is that a little smile on his mouth as he stands there
Not much longer now, the old midwife Anna says
If it’s a boy we’ll name him Johannes, Olai says
We’ll see, she says
Johannes, yes, Olai says
Like my father, he says
Yes, that’s a good name, the old midwife Anna says
and another scream comes from the room, louder now
Patience, Olai, says the old midwife Anna
Patience, she says
Do you hear me? she says
Be patient, she says
You’re a fisherman, you know how womenfolk don’t belong in the boat, right? she says
Uh huh, Olai says
It’s the same for menfolk here, do you know what would happen? the old midwife Anna says
Yes, bad luck, Olai says
Exactly, bad luck, yes, the old midwife Anna says and Olai sees Anna the old midwife go straight to the door of the room and she is holding the bowl of hot water in front of her with outstretched arms and then Anna the old midwife stops in front of the door to the room and she turns around to face Olai
Don’t just stand there, the old midwife Anna says
and that scares Olai, can just standing here cause bad luck unintentionally? no that can’t be what she meant, and will something go wrong now, with Marta, the woman he loves and honours and respects so much, his beloved, his wife, now will something, no, it can’t
Close the kitchen door, Olai, and sit down on your chair, the old midwife Anna says
and Olai sits down at one end of the kitchen table and he puts his elbows on the table and he holds his head in his hands and it’s good he took Magda to his brother’s today, Olai thinks, when he went to get Anna the old midwife he rowed around to his brother’s with Magda first and he didn’t know if that was the right thing to do, because she’s almost a grown woman, Magda, the years go by so fast, but Marta asked him to, when it was time and he was going to row out to get Anna the old midwife he had to take Magda with him so that she could stay with his brother during the birth, she was still too young to learn too exactly what awaited her as a grown woman, Marta had said, and he had to do what she told him to do, of course, even if he would actually have liked to have Magda at home now, she’s such a smart and sensible girl, has been for as long as he can remember, good at everything she does, he ended up with a good daughter, Olai thinks, but then it didn’t seem like the Lord God would grant them more children, Marta wasn’t with child again and the years went by and eventually they resigned themselves to not having any more children, that was just how it was, that was their fate they said and they thanked the Lord God for having given them Magda because if they hadn’t had even her, no, it would have been sad and lonely for them here on the island of Holmen where they lived, in the house he had built himself, his brothers and neighbours had helped of course but he had done most of the work himself, and when he’d proposed to Marta he already had Holmen, he had bought it for a small sum and thought it all out, where their house should be built, he had thought of that, it had to be sheltered from the wind and the storms, where the boat house and landing should be, he had thought of that too, he needed those too didn’t he, and the first thing he built was the landing, in a calm bay facing inland, sheltered from the wind and storms from the sea to the west of Holmen, yes, and then he built the house, not so very big and not all that nice maybe but it was good enough and now, now Marta was lying in the room there about to give him a son at last, now little Johannes was about to be born, he was sure of it, Olai thought, sitting there at the end of the kitchen table, on his chair, his head propped up in his hands, as long as nothing goes wrong, as long as Marta has a good birth, brings the child into the world, as long as the child little Johannes doesn’t stay inside Marta’s belly and neither survives, little Johannes or Marta, as long as what happened to his mother that terrible day doesn’t happen now, to Marta, no, he can’t bear to think about it, Olai thinks, because they’ve been so good together, Olai and Marta, they loved each other from the very first moment, Olai thinks, but now? will Marta be taken from him now? could God be so evil to him?
(…)
‘Something in the critical self is shed in the process of reading Fosse, only to be replaced by something more primal. A mood. An atmosphere. The sound of words moving on a page.’
— Ruth Margalit, New York Review of Books
Praise for A Shining
‘A Shining can be read in many ways: as a realistic monologue; as a fable; as a Christian-inflected allegory; as a nightmare painstakingly recounted the next morning, the horror of the experience still pulsing under the words, though somewhat mitigated by the small daily miracle of daylight. I think the great splendour of Fosse’s fiction is that it so deeply rejects any singular interpretation; as one reads, the story does not sound a clear singular note, but rather becomes a chord with all the many possible interpretations ringing out at once. This refusal to succumb to the solitary, the stark, the simple, the binary – to insist that complicated things like death and God retain their immense mysteries and contradictions – seems, in this increasingly partisan world of ours, a quietly powerful moral stance.’
— Lauren Groff, Guardian
‘Fosse’s prose doesn’t speak so much as witnesses, unfolds, accumulates. It flows like consciousness itself…. This is perhaps why A Shining feels so momentous, even at fewer than 50 pages. You never quite know where you’re going. But it doesn’t matter: you want to follow, to move in step with the rhythm of these words.’
— Matthew Janney, Financial Times
‘The translation by Damion Searls perfectly judges the pitch and rhythm … producing a natural reading beat.… A Shining is a neat example of Fosse’s gift for portraying porous psychological states, and its publication is perfectly timed for a satisfying Samhain evening read.’
— Rónán Hession, Irish Times
‘The physical and otherworldly hinterland of A Shining through which Jon Fosse is the guide is at once terrifying and deeply reassuring.’
— Catherine Taylor, Times Literary Supplement
‘He touches you so deeply when you read him, and when you have read one work you have to continue…. What is special with him is the closeness in his writing. It touches on the deepest feelings that you have – anxieties, insecurities, questions of life and death – such things that every human being actually confronts from the very beginning. In that sense I think he reaches very far and there is a sort of a universal impact of everything that he writes. And it doesn’t matter if it is drama, poetry or prose – it has the same kind of appeal to this basic humanness.’
— Anders Olsson, Nobel committee
‘A Shining is marked by what is perhaps Fosse’s defining skill: his ability to effortlessly marry the mundane and the sublime. The author is himself a practicing Catholic; he was received into the Church in 2012, and a certain spiritual seriousness is at the heart of his works’ power, even while their spirit everywhere shuns the dogmatic. Expect from Fosse neither the supposedly infallible truths of the pulpit nor Scripture’s resonant cadence. The experience of reading him is of a different order entirely, one more humble, and perhaps as illuminating.’
— Luke Warde, Sunday Independent
‘In this spare tale of disorientation and longing, by the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, a man gets stranded on a back road in a forest and wanders deep into the trees…. Fosse uses fleeting allusions to a world beyond the reach of the narrator to explore some of humanity’s most elusive pursuits, certainty and inviolability among them. His bracingly clear prose imbues the story’s ambiguities with a profundity both revelatory and familiar.’
— New Yorker
Praise for Septology
‘Fosse has written a strange mystical moebius strip of a novel, in which an artist struggles with faith and loneliness, and watches himself, or versions of himself, fall away into the lower depths. The social world seems distant and foggy in this profound, existential narrative.’
— Hari Kunzru, author of White Tears
‘Having read the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse’s Septology, an extraordinary seven-novel sequence about an old man’s recursive reckoning with the braided realities of God, art, identity, family life and human life itself, I’ve come into awe and reverence myself for idiosyncratic forms of immense metaphysical fortitude.’
— Randy Boyagoda, New York Times
Jon Fosse was born in 1959 on the west coast of Norway and is the recipient of countless prestigious prizes, both in his native Norway and abroad. Since his 1983 fiction debut, Raudt, svart [Red, Black], Fosse has written prose, poetry, essays, short stories, children’s books and over forty plays. In 2023, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable’.
Damion Searls is a translator from German, Norwegian, French and Dutch, and a writer in English. He has translated eleven books by Jon Fosse, including the three books of Septology.
