Few writers working today capture the liminality of life as viscerally as the Norwegian 2023 Nobel prize winner Jon Fosse, and in Morning and Evening, his newly republished 2000 novella (elegantly translated by Damion Searls), we follow one person’s passage from womb to Earth, and from Earth to the afterlife, in a near seamless progression. This, then, is not a novel that describes a life; it is a fable about the very beginning and end of a life – a metaphysical ghost story.
The two-part book opens with a woman delivering her second child in a house on the island of Holmen. Olai, the father whose perspective we inhabit, waits anxiously in the kitchen. Could both baby and mother die? No, “God surely doesn’t want that”, but then Olai has “never doubted that Satan rules this world as much as the good Lord does”. As in his seven-volume masterpiece Septology (2019), Fosse’s prose is suffused with mysticism, and a more personal and nuanced theism. There was no doubt in Olai’s mind that God exists, but he “has never fully believed that He is all-powerful and all-knowing like they say, the pious people”. The good Lord does not rule all and decide everything. On that day, however, He prevails. The mother survives. The child comes into the world alive and healthy. Olai names him Johannes, after his father, and decides that he will be a fisherman like himself.
