Manny's Reviews > Morgon og kveld

After a while, you realise that all of Jon Fosse's books are really parts of the same book, or maybe different drafts of the same book. I don't mean that in a bad way: it's just how he is. Morgon og kveld seems to provide about a quarter of the material that later got turned into Septologien, and Melancholia I-II provided another quarter. Septologien improves on both of them, but the earlier books retain their own individual charm, and that is exactly as it should be. I'm sure there are hundreds of thousands of authors who wish their own œuvres made this much sense.

He has a beautiful, inimitable style. I see some people complaining that he has no sense of humour, and in fact that's not at all true: it's a subtle humour inherent in the rhythms and word-choices he uses and I can see several of his translators tearing their hair out over the technical challenges it sets them, which they admit are basically insurmountable. It's worth learning some Nynorsk just to be able to read him in the original; if you already know a Scandinavian language, you'll find it's surprisingly easy, and you won't regret the time you invested.