How is everything going? Are you hungry? I'm going to eat a Rekesmørbrød - a typical Norwegian prawn toast - and I'll snack while we talk, announces a smiling Jon Fosse (Haugesund, 1959) in the luxurious Biblioteksbaren of the Bristol Hotel in Oslo, a large room full of leather sofas to sink into, heavy rugs and shelves full of old books that has been the favorite meeting place for more than a century. of politicians, writers, musicians and journalists in the Norwegian capital.
We went to our appointment with the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature to talk about Hotel Vaim (Random House), the second part of his trilogy dedicated to this imaginary place, a transcript of the towns and fjords of western Norway where the author grew up, in which he explores love, loss and memory, loneliness, restlessness and the mystical to reveal through a ghostly atmosphere the deep complexity of human relationships and existential spirituality.
In Hotel Vaim the world moves towards an establishment where things seem to have stopped obeying ordinary laws. The Guest, always nameless, remains there without us knowing very well why, objects appear and disappear, relationships become entangled and the border between what is real and what is imagined becomes increasingly porous. There is something nightmarish, but also a disconcerting comedy in this man who seems incapable of governing his own life. Fosse clarifies, however, that he did not start from any thesis about the human condition.
"After writing Septology [his great novel], which was a very demanding job, I wanted to do something calmer, something that I liked and didn't force me to aspire to more. I started writing while waiting for my daughter to get out of her French classes. I sat there with my notebooks and wrote by hand, with various colors, to have a little fun. And this universe appeared." What began as an exercise in freedom ended up becoming another way to explore his obsessions. "I really liked writing these novels. It was not a burden. For me, that is not a weakness but rather another way of presenting a story."
The hotel is, in effect, a place of passage where one settles without fully belonging. Fosse compares it to an airport, that intermediate space that places us in a city without really living in it, waiting for a destination that can be delayed indefinitely: "Maybe all hotels are a kind of purgatory. You are there, you can sleep, but you are not completely anywhere." The image extends to a good part of his work, populated by characters who seem suspended between life and death, the past and the present, what happened and what could have happened.
In Hotel Vaim, furthermore, the Guest gradually submits to rules that no one has explained to them. Freedom, in Fosse, is never a property that one can take for granted. His characters do not always know what they want, nor are they able to oppose their desires when they recognize them. "We spend most of our time obeying unwritten rules, simply to behave in a more or less decent way. We can break them, of course, but we have to be willing to accept the consequences. And we almost always act unconsciously," he reflects.
The strangeness of this universe should not be confused with an exercise in solemn darkness. One of the surprises it holds is its humor, which does not alleviate the restlessness but rather makes it even stranger. A fishing gear that appears and disappears, an encounter that should not occur, a character who always seems to be on the verge of understanding something, but never finishes doing so: the comic emerges without the writer looking for it. "When I started writing, my novels were absolutely dark, destructive, almost nihilistic. Then, something changed. My work continued to be tragic, but a comic side also appeared. Since then, much of what I have written is somewhere in between: it is neither tragedy nor comedy, but both at the same time. Like life."
"Art is the opposite of war. While politics divides the world into two sides, literature, which is ambiguous, can say two opposite things"
Fosse carefully distinguishes between being humorous and being comical. The first wants to make people laugh, but in the second case the laughter happens without anyone having summoned it. "When I write, my only concern is to do what the work needs, I'm not trying to be funny. Sometimes things are just funny. And that can be just as serious as the tragic." In this border area, two of his great teachers reappear, Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka, although it is the second to whom he grants greater admiration. "Kafka is, perhaps, the writer I admire most. When I was young, Beckett interested me greatly, and I still do, but over the years I have seen more clearly the enormous influence that Kafka had on him. We usually talk about Joyce and Beckett, but, if you delve deeper into them, you always find the echo of Kafka."
The affinity becomes especially visible in Hotel Vaim. Fosse acknowledges that his own writing is not very similar to that of either of them, but he does find in this novel some of the disconcerting logic of the author of The Trial: «Kafka was a very comic writer. There is this prejudice that it is not, but just read it carefully. Their stories are tragic and comic at the same time, like Beckett's and, in many ways, like mine. In that logic, a man can be arrested one morning without having committed any crime and accept, despite everything, that the world works that way. The explanation does not come because there may be nothing to explain. "The absurd is not an anomaly that the writer must correct, but one of the forms that human experience takes," he emphasizes, and insists: "Paradox is fundamental in my writing. Things can be one and the other at the same time, without one of the two possibilities canceling out the other.
This conviction links his literature with faith, a relationship that has become increasingly central in his work. Fosse does not present himself as someone who has resolved religious questions, but as someone who has learned to live with them. "Being a Christian means accepting a paradox. The Trinity, for example, is one and three at the same time. From a scientific point of view that seems impossible, but literature and religion can contain those contradictions. You have to accept the mystery. If you think you can explain everything you cannot believe that way."
"The Nobel Prize is a blessing but it has a flip side: it turns you into an object, a national icon, it forces you to fight to return to your old life"
As he has recounted many times, his path to faith was not linear. As a young man he tried to be a Marxist and an atheist, but there was something in his own experience of writing that he could not explain from a materialist perspective. "When I wrote I asked myself where that came from: the voices, the characters, the settings... I couldn't understand it," he recalls. "My mind began to open to the invisible and, then, to the idea of God. I felt something very close and, at the same time, very far away. I can say that I believe in God, but I cannot say what God is. I know that he is there, close to me, although I cannot explain how." Fosse's faith does not seem like a blunt answer, but rather a way of having an open conversation.
That is why, he remembers, he was so surprised by the reception of Septology, the extensive novel starring a painter named Asle, Catholic and dedicated to reflection on the existence, creation and possibility of grace. In Norwegian society, he recalls, "the word God had for a long time been almost unpronounceable in the literary field. I was convinced that people would not like that religious dimension, I thought that the book would suffer a great rejection but the opposite happened, in Norway and in many other countries. I realized that I had misunderstood something important: our contemporary society needs to ask itself these questions. It was a very strange experience and also very surprising."
This need does not imply for him, however, that the Church must recover the power it had in other times. From his Norwegian perspective, the institution has lost much of its authority and, precisely because of this, can play another role. Fosse maintains a close relationship with the Quakers, whose spiritual tradition dispenses with priests and sacraments, and sees in the liturgy a possible counterpoint to contemporary noise. "In northern Europe, people barely care about the Church. Before it was perfectly reasonable to criticize it because it had too much power, but today I'm not sure that's the problem. In Norway a church can be a place of silence, a space that opposes the demand that everything be subject to money, capitalism and commercial interests."
Silence is not an absence for him but a form of attention. It is at the center of his theatrical writing, in which the words seem to be drawn on a white space, and also in Asle's experience, who seeks in him the possibility of listening to God. "We live in a world where everything is noise. People want noise and more noise, perhaps to calm down, to stop thinking. I think we need, in literature and in general, to give more space to silence. It is not about withdrawing from reality, but about stopping subjecting it to the obligation to speak out at every moment," he claims.
However, we cautiously ask you to comment on the wave of protests shaking Europe. Fosse, subtly, once again distrusts labels: "I'm not a political writer, I don't know if that exists, I'm just a writer. You can interpret my literature from the left or from the right, as you wish. But I hope to be a good writer, because then maybe I can contribute something valuable to the world. My way of supporting young people's protests is to show them with my books that there is another possible world." Fosse does not understand this position as a renunciation of responsibility, but as another way of exercising it. "A good book can have political implications without becoming a manifesto or offering answers to the problems of the present. As Wittgenstein said, ethics and aesthetics are the same," he quotes.
"Literature and art are the opposite of war," he continues. "In a war, one side says one thing and the other says the opposite. Something similar happens in politics. Literature, on the other hand, can say both things at the same time. It does not simplify the world, but rather returns it to the ambiguity it really has." Again ambiguity, a nuclear idea in the work and life of the Nobel Prize winner. "Good literature does not eliminate contradiction so that the reader feels safe; he preserves it, even when it is uncomfortable." In times when so many leaders promise to restore certainties, the writer claims precisely the opposite.
"If you remove the writer from the text it stops being a living experience. Write something physical, like playing an instrument. "You write with your hands, not just with your head."
The author recalls an observation by the American critic Harold Bloom: "He said that good literature does not teach us how to live, but how to die, and I think it is a very correct idea. Literature teaches us something about uncertainty, which is both the most certain and the most indeterminate of our existence. Death is inevitable, even if we cannot understand it. Good literature maintains that ambiguity, it does not try to resolve it." Fosse does not seek his novels to be enigmatic, he simply does not believe that reality can be reduced to a single explanation without something essential being lost along the way.
This uncertainty also reaches the reader. The Norwegian assures that he never thinks about himself while writing. "If I did, I would be afraid and I wouldn't be able to write. I would think that what I'm doing is going to be published and available for anyone to read. It's a terrifying idea," he admits with a laugh. However, there is nothing accidental about his writing: "When you write you are addressing something. I compare it to a prayer, it is not intended for a specific person, but for God." Thus, the work is born from a singular experience, but is not confined to it. "A good artist manages to transform the most idiosyncratic part of himself into something universal. "My favorite painter for years is Mark Rothko, his work is completely unique and, at the same time, can reach anyone."
Art, therefore, is not limited to representing a previous reality, it can create one that did not exist before. The world of the Hotel Vaim may not be real in the literal sense, but for its readers it acquires a consistency of its own, it is a place to return to and in which to recognize something of their own experience. Fosse's skepticism towards artificial intelligence is born from this belief. For him, a machine can produce correct texts, even incorporate errors to simulate a human voice, but it can never replace the origin of a work of art. "Generating text is not the same as creating literature. In literature, emotion is fundamental, and also understanding through emotions. In theater, in poetry, we understand that way, not through a concept, as in philosophy. A machine can produce emotions, but if you discover that what has moved you comes from it, you may feel that someone has betrayed you."
The issue is not reduced to formal perfection or the ability to imitate a style. "Art has to do with the most intimate part of the human being and a machine does not and will never have that spiritual dimension," he emphasizes. "The fundamental creation must come from a person. Then you can copy a work, reproduce it, but that is not the same as creating it." And he adds something that brings the conversation back to silence: "Writing is also a pleasure, the pleasure of discovering things while you write. If you remove the writer from the text, at least for me, it stops being a living experience. It's something physical, like playing an instrument. "You write with your hands, not just with your head."
"Good literature does not teach us how to live, but how to die. It shows us, at the same time, the safest and most ambiguous part of our existence."
The Nobel Prize has turned Fosse into a public figure on a much larger scale than that playwright who for years saw his works performed throughout Europe and ended up leaving the theater to return to the novel. Today he remembers the surprise of discovering that there were suddenly a hundred productions of his works in Germany, or that his name was circulating in settings he would never have imagined, such as China and Japan. However, he recognizes that the 2023 award represented a transformation on another scale. "For me it was a blessing, of course. every writer
