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.
The second part, chiefly told from Johannes’s point of view, chronicles the eerie hours after he wakes up one morning, late in his old age. Johannes is a now retired fisherman. His wife, Erna, is long dead. His mornings are “sad and lonely”. Johannes makes coffee. He steps out of the house and everything he beholds seems different somehow. He meets his dead neighbour, and good friend Peter, and they go fishing. Johannes later bumps into his daughter Signe and “is seized with deep despair, because Signe cannot see him or hear him”. At the tale’s close, Peter accompanies Johannes to a place where nothing hurts and “everything you love is there”.
Fosse has a precious ear for the muted whimpers of grief; there are such depths of ache contained in this brief novel. That we begin the journey of dying as soon as we are born may be one of this book’s most effectively dramatised insights, but it succeeds, no less brilliantly, in conveying late-life pain and melancholia; what the days feel like once friends and lovers are gone and we have but our own vanishing selves for company.
• Morning and Evening by Jon Fosse (translated by Damion Searls) is published by Fitzcarraldo (£9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
