Scenes from a Childhood

(Paperback)

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Description

In the title work, a loosely autobiographical narrative covers infancy to awkward adolescence, unearthing the moments of childhood that linger longest in the imagination. In 'And Then My Dog Will Come Back To Me', a haunting and dream-like novella, a dispute between neighbours escalates to an inexorable climax. Taken from various sources, the texts gathered here together for the first time demonstrate that the short story is one of the recurrent modes of Fosse's imagination, and occasions some of his greatest works.

'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.' - New York Times

Reviews

'Jon Fosse is a major European writer.' - Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of My Struggle

'The Beckett of the twenty-first century.' - Le Monde

'With its heavy silences and splintered dialogue, his work has reminded some of Beckett, others of Pinter.' - Guardian

'Fosse's prose ... builds out of an ambiguity and sparseness and moves with a slow poetic intensity.... The collection has all the hallmarks of Fosse's signature brooding manner where lyrical precision is used to paint unmoored psyches. An accumulation of moments when our essential emotions come into conflict with experience, Scenes from a Childhood is a welcome - if overdue - introduction to a singular literary voice.' - Tank

'Fosse writes about the complexity and danger of the bleak Norwegian countryside as well as he writes about the passage of time through a life. In choosing to mostly focus on pieces about childhood, Searls has been able to show an impressive side to Fosse, because - in my experience at least - writing engaging prose about childhood trips up many otherwise competent writers.... Fosse understands that a child's mind is not merely the mind of an ignorant adult, it is a different form of consciousness entirely: more curious, more optimistic, less scared.... There are portraits of great happiness, great pleasure and great joy in Scenes From A Childhood.' - Berfrois

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. A New Name, the final volume in Septology, his latest prose work, will be published in 2021 by Fitzcarraldo Editions.