Aliss at the Fire WINNER OF THE 2023 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

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Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2023


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.

Aliss at the Fire, is a visionary masterpiece, a haunting exploration of love and loss that ranks among the greatest meditations on marriage and human fate.

Reviews

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'The Beckett of the twenty-first century.'

- Le Monde

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'It is some measure of Fosse's talents that he manages to weave such a compelling narrative from a largely static setting ... Nothing really happens and yet there is something quietly dramatic about Fosse's meandering and rhythmic prose, aided by Damion Searls's limber translation, which has a strangely mesmerising effect. ... [A]n intense reading experience.'

- Lucy Popescu, Independent

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'A drowning is solemnly relived over the generations in Fosse's circuitous, claustrophobic tale. ... The immense burden of family history weighs heavily on each generation as ghosts, memories, and tragedies collide to effects both confounding and enlightening.'

- Publishers Weekly

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'Prose doesn't have hooks, and Fosse's incantations are as unexcerptable as Philip Glass symphonies or Bela Tarr tracking shots.... On it goes, building layer upon layer of past and present, ancestors and loved ones, until you are immersed in that world and the prose conjures luminous glory flashing past like Blakean angels. Maybe it is convincing to say that Fosse is the only writer whose book has made me weep with emotion as I translated it.'

- Damion Searls, Paris Review

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'It is becoming increasingly difficult to find any Norwegian author who can equal Jon Fosse.'

- Tom Egil Hverven, NRK

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Author Bio

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, with more than a thousand productions performed and translations into fifty languages. Aliss at the Fire is his fifth work of fiction to appear with Fitzcarraldo Editions.