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Det Er Ales (2003)

by Jon Fosse(Favorite Author)

3.72 of 5 Votes: 1

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Samlaget

review 1: Fosse has a great gift for depicting hallucinatory madness. Unlike his earlier novel, "Melancholy," about a schizophrenic painter, "Aliss at the Fire" has a more Gothic feel (reminiscent of Faulkner) in the ways in which the past shapes--and traps--the present. In this novel, Signe, widow to Asle for over 20 years, remembers the day in which Asle never returned home--and family history, going back five generations, that influenced his disappearance.
review 2: This is a pretty beautiful little book, a shortish ghost-haunted story and a long-ass sentence all in one. There's a clear, icy simplicity to the prose (much as in another Norwegian writer I've just discovered, Tove Jansson) that's addictive, and allows the book to take liberties with moving around in time... more in a way that just feels fluid and lovely rather than jarring. Ultimately, the one long run-on sentence (interrupted by dialogue) gambit works (and is itself a nice feat of translation here) because as a reader the speed of it it pulls us in and drags us under: in a sense, we too are swept out to sea by the writing. less

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