Ales by the bonfire

Idioma original: Norwegian
Original title: It’s Ales
Translation: Cristina Gómez-Baggethun in Spanish for Random House
Year of publication: 2004
Valuation: highly recommended

The story begins in a very dark and disturbing way: Signe sees herself at home, on a Tuesday at the end of November 1979, the very day that Asle, her partner, disappeared. The vision she has is of entering the room again and seeing him, in the darkness of an autumn afternoon, “looking out into the darkness, with his long, dark hair and his black jumper”. A darkness that surrounds him and embraces him, peering out without seeing anything, just looking at the darkness, the lack of light, the nothingness. A darkness that merges with him, forming a single thing, because she can barely make him out and that transmits a restlessness, a nervousness, asking herself “why is he doing this? (…) Why is he just standing there, when there is nothing to see? » He, in his reverie, says that he is thinking of going to see the fjords again, in his little boat, despite the bad weather and the cold, despite the fact that it is dark and it is the end of November, despite the wind and the waves. Because he is a solitary person, shy and quiet, and he needs solitude. An outing to the outside from which we know he will not return, leaving her surrounded by doubts and questions thrown into the air with no return other than the echo of her fears and worries in the face of a presence that may never return.

As we saw in “Blancura”, the author also uses the interior monologue in this work; however, in this case, he does it from different voices that act as narrators, since the book is a continuous monologue although in this case the narration is shared between different characters (mainly the main couple) in an alternation that Fosse masters perfectly and exchanges without jumps, without pauses, with hardly any full stops; everything flows naturally in his story, everything is perfectly harmonized and the third-person narration is, in this case, the opposite of an omniscient narrator, since Fosse narrates in the third person what his characters do or feel in such a close way that it seems as if they themselves are telling us, it seems as if you are in their heads and feel the same as each one of them, making it very easy to empathize with a narration so simple but at the same time so profound. In fact, it is as if the characters were separated and narrated to themselves, which sometimes really happens, so that they are seen from the outside in a kind of projection that allows the author to analyze and narrate without direct interference from the distortion of the protagonist subject. The third-person narration gives it rigor and a point of objectivity even though it is known that the narrator is the protagonist himself, thereby proving that Fosse has a great talent for achieving absolute proximity with the protagonists without having to resort to first-person narration. for himself.

After this initial scene from which the story continues continuously, the narration focuses on that fateful day, on those last words exchanged between them, on those last gestures, on the decision about whether it was convenient to leave or not; those memories invade her and hit her, because, despite the fact that many years have passed, a couple of decades, she continues to remember him, remembering not only those last moments but also her life, her relationship, his infinite presence in her house, the way he took over each of the spaces and conversations, leaving her alone before his presence, alone before her ideas, alone before her needs trying to somehow bring out her personality. But, even years later she continues to remember that last meeting, his endless presence, his silences and the loneliness that infected her. And in this continuous analysis in which the thoughts of both are exchanged, other voices belonging to the family, to their past, to a lineage of several generations that drag ghosts, losses and misfortunes are added to the story.

Fosse’s style captures you and immerses you in a state in which he manages to drag you into his thoughts, his concerns, his anxieties, his questions and the permanent embrace of solitude with which he seeks to get closer to what we are and what we have become. The Norwegian author knows, like few others, how to reach those feelings so intimate, so dark and at the same time so hopeful when discovering that there is still literature that manages to reach our innermost self and see that perhaps we are alone, but that we are not the only ones.