A book a day: Jon Fosse: Morning and Evening

The Nobel Prizes allow, on some occasions, to recognize the work of already established and widely known authors, but, in other cases, they serve so that readers (and also a few literary critics) discover authors who, otherwise, would have gone unnoticed. . In my case, it recently allowed me to meet Tokarczuc and also Fosse (of whom there have been quite a few reviews since he was awarded the prestigious award).

In this short book, the author begins the story with the birth of Marta, Olai’s partner, who will give birth to a child who will be called Johannes, after his grandfather. They already have a slightly older daughter, called Magda, and the arrival of Johannes is a pleasant surprise since she had a hard time getting pregnant. They are religious and know that even though anything can happen during childbirth, they think that God is on their side and they face this vital moment between the anguish of the moment and the satisfaction in the belief that everything will go well, although always with misgivings. that this luck can change. Immediately afterwards, the author makes a change of register to focus on what will be the central axis of the story and goes on to narrate the monotony of an ordinary day in the life of Johannes, the grandfather, who suddenly lost his wife Erna and who passes the days in the daily routine, where fishing has an important presence as it accompanies him in the solitude of his days. On one of those outings, he thinks he sees his friend Peter, although he is not sure if he is really present and it is there that Fosse returns to those dreamlike scenarios so typical of his work (“and they both start walking along the shore and Johannes realizes that it is difficult for Peter to move forward, it is as if, instead of walking, he was levitating”) in which, as he already did in “Ales by the Bonfire”, a type of monologue occurs in which he reflects on the old friendships, the customs existing between him and his friend with the present and prevailing doubt about whether Peter is really there or if he imagines him because, even though he is talking to him, «wasn’t he dead, Peter? Hadn’t he died a long time ago, too? (…) “maybe I should ask him if he is alive or dead, but where are you going, everything has a limit and you can’t ask something like that.” In this way, following the path traced by Peter who appears and disappears from his vision acting as a spiritual guide like Beatrice in Dante’s Divine Comedy, Johannes relives scenes from his past turning an apparently simple text into a story that talks about the nostalgia and lived experiences.