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Book Cover for: Aliss at the Fire, Jon Fosse

Aliss at the Fire

Jon Fosse

Reader Score

74%

74% of readers

recommend this book

From the 2023 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, a haunting masterpiece exploring love, loss, and human fate.

In her old house by the fjord, Signe lies on a bench and sees a vision of herself as she was more than twenty years earlier: standing by the window waiting for her husband Asle, on that terrible late November day when he took his rowboat out onto the water and never returned. Her memories widen out to include their whole life together, and beyond: the bonds of family and the battles with implacable nature stretching back over five generations, to Asle's great-great-grandmother Aliss. In Jon Fosse's vivid, hallucinatory prose, all these moments in time inhabit the same space, and the ghosts of the past collide with those who still live on.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
  • Publish Date: Sep 16th, 2010
  • Pages: 107
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 6.90in - 4.90in - 0.50in - 0.26lb
  • EAN: 9781564785732
  • Categories: Literary

About the Author

Fosse, Jon: - Called the new Ibsen in the German press, and heralded throughout Western Europe, Jon Fosse is one of contemporary Norwegian literature s most important writers. In 2000, his novel Melancholy won the Melsom Prize, and Fosse was awarded a lifetime stipend from the Norwegian government for his future literary efforts.
Searls, Damion: - Damion Searls is a writer in English and translator from German, French, Dutch, and Norwegian. Searls has translated writers including Ingeborg Bachmann, Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, Christa Wolf; his translation of Hans Keilson's "Comedy in a Minor Key"was a New York Times Notable Book of 2010 and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist in Fiction.

Praise for this book

What he writes is so simple and so deep at the same time. He has a restlessness, a tension in his narrative style, and he writes about situations everyone feels involved in, no matter where in the world they are.
Fosse . . . has been compared to Ibsen and to Beckett, and it is easy to see his work as Ibsen stripped down to its emotional essentials. But it is much more. For one thing, it has a fierce poetic simplicity.