Jon Fosse: Trilogy

The fate of the fiddler is fatal… always giving yourself to others… always trying to make others whole…

…and if he was asked where it (music) came from, he answered that it probably came from grief, grieving over something, or just grief, and in the music grief could lighten and become soaring and the soaring could become happiness and joy, so therefore music was needed, therefore he had to play… 

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It was the violin on the cover that decided my first Jon Fosse. I wouldn’t have known where to start, and I have been eager to start ever since he received the Nobel for prose which “gives voice to the unsayable”.

And so it was the violin, or rather the fiddle. And because of the fiddle, I sit here a day after reading the last line. A day, because for an entire day I could not write anything about it. I could only feel and think of it and nurse this prolonged pinch in my heart. And maybe that’s how it’s supposed to be, and I should drop my attempt to say something clever about it. 

Because I sit here and feel drenched by the weight of simplicity. Because in his words there is a childlike simplicity that humbles what we think we know about expressing life and about storytelling. Because Jon Fosse is a poet, and his poetry and prose bleed into each other, leaving no borders between them.