Bergens Tidende 05.09.1996
Louis Muinzer
"Someone Is Going to Come"
"...After having read only a few pages of Fosse's play, the text had my full attention: here one had an extremely special voice, a special dramatist. That became clear immediately, and there was no doubt of it. If my memory isn't playing tricks, I had the same experience forty years ago when I read plays by the then unknown Harold Pinter..."
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Bergens Tidende 30.07.1998
Berit Gullberg
"...What he writes is so simple and so deep at the same time. He has a restlessness, a tension in his narrative style, and he writes about situations everyone feels involved in, no matter where in the world they are. His style is rhetorical and repetative, and as a dramatist he digs his way into the human soul..." |
Aftenposten 04.04.1997
Thorkil Evan Nielsen, director
Black Box teater
"...Fosse's novels are fantastic, they have extreme power in their portrayal of people's inner struggle. They have an inner language that is quite fascinating; I feel that I have found "my" langauge, even if it happens to be New Norwegian..."
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Bergens Tidende 26.07.1996
Anne-Stefi Teigland
"Dog Manuscripts"
"...The two Dog Manuscripts are written as independent stories, but thematically and in terms of narrative technique there are many common features. Their dramatic aspect is knitted to everyday life and the individual's experience of existence. Fosse's use of language creates an intensity and a presence that raise the external course of action onto a plane of excitement knitted to the central character's thoughts and reflections. In other words, it isn't primarily what happens, but the central character's experience of what happens that stands in focus..."
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Bergens Tidende 25.08.1995
Pål Gerhard Olsen
"Melancholia I"
"...It is the meaning of the image that Fosse's novel circles about, that is, the inner image, which the streaming light, the revelation of something in the back that is essential for the creation of art. The ability to see is the basis of this. Everything springs from the optic nerve, the intensified, mind-based optic nerve. Fosse describes a painter who sees too much, who suffers from possessing too strong a light, who so to speak burns up from within, something that leads him into madness, but also into a frontier-crossing, inspired landscape art..."
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Aftenposten 17.12.1997
Ingunn Økland
"Nye dikt"
"...New poems by Jon Fosse contains a series of attractive and advanced texts. In a thematically concentrated collection, Fosse attempts to shape new structures of light and dark, something that thrusts the poems in the direction of mysticism's insights into the interdependence of these forces..."
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Aftenposten 30.03.1992
Knut Ødegård
"Lead and Water", novel
"...It is above all in the examination of the language and in the consistent conformity of language and content--or situation--that the novel holds the reader fast. Is there language left behind when the references slip away? Between the journalist and the street girl there are not much more left of such references than, for example, cigarettes, clothes, briefcase, pub, newsstand and supermarket. And after that, the language becomes childish, worn-down to what lies nearest the eye and before the hand--plus some leftovers of older experiences and fragments of life that now and then sail into the language and the conversation without any obvious connection..."
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Aftenposten 10.11.1994
Knut Ødegård
"Prose from a time of growth"
"...Prose from a time of growth contains a peeling-away of the language until what is quite simple is left behind with all its mysteries; he comes down to a zero point where the language is cleared of the slag of symbol-bearing and case-pleading found in old writers, but gives simultaneously new opportunities to express both the primitive, the sacred and splendid new relationships. Here are both the sea, death and love with all their potential to extend meaning, for the one who wishes..."
"...Rhythm is an element that Jon Fosse uses in a masterly fashion; in this book there are also clear resemblances to line drawing, caricature, and a form of commonplace, cinema-like pitfalls that may remind one a bit of early Chaplin films. The absurd and the tragic lie close to each other..."
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Aftenposten 19.05.1996
Ragnhild Kr. Olsen
"The Name"
"...Problems of communication characterize the relationship both between the future parents and between them and the other family members. In a close atmosphere of silence and frustration there is only the question of what the child is going to be called that causes attempts at real dialogue in the family. Despite this bleak framework, the piece is not without humour. Amusing dialogue springs from the strained family situation and communication barrier..."
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Aftenposten 14.10.1996
Egil Mikkelsen
"Prose", CD Fosse/Seglem
"...The man has a surgeon's ability to use the scalpel and to cut in the most the most prosaic, everyday happenings, to tear loose fragments of life, to place them under the microscope and examine them minutely, in order to present them afterwards as a precipitous, West-Norway-coloured, feverish dream of a Hieronymous Bosch nightmare, sometimes so endlessly desolate, dark and fearful that Kafka himself would have got frightened if he met some of these texts in the dark..."
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Bergens Tidende, 28.09.1996
Pål Gerhard Olsen
"Melancholia II"
"...Melancholia II is boldly different--rather than a novel spesifically about Lars Hertervig, it is a deeply moving and gripping novel about a sister-and-brother relationship, about memory's luminous power over death, encased in a remarkable portrait of a woman..."
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Bergens Tidende 09.03.1997
Sissel Hamre Dagsland
"Mother and Child", "The Son"
"...It is oppressive and dark and cold and lonely in the dramatic world of Jon Fosse's two new one-acters, which are performed together at the National Theatre. The people want so much to reach each other, but can't. Their life has become like that. They understand corners of it and can say much about it. But what is most important is never said. It rests in the pauses and the silence between the words, as always with Jon Fosse..."
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Bergens Tidende 04.09.1996
Frode Grytten in an interview with Jon Fosse
(About theatre and literature) "...One can say something that can't be said in another way. In everything you write you conjure up a landscape, nerve-bare, wet and dark ..."
Le Monde 14.08.1998
Jean-Louis Perrier,
"Melancholia I"
"...He is not of the kind to accomodate itself to grace in writing. It would be a negation of grace and still more of writing. His novel presents itself as an exploration of zones that are murky, dangerous, crucial, where craftmanship and inspiration seek and repulse each other up to the coils of madness. If the least temptation of salvation were to touch upon him, his writing would return it to the sender. It is the restrained patience and anxiety that shape, beleaguer and design this radiant nucleus that justifies writing--or painting..."
Translated by Louis Muinzer
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Dagens Nyheter 26.11.1998
Leif Zern
"The Name"
"...It is an excellent little ensemble that enters this nameless world at Backstage. To take my eyes from Simon Norrthon in the role of the Boy, I had to force myself, and feels like awakening from a dream: his movements--slowly called forth like the metaphors in a Tomas Tranströmer poem--are at the same time realistic and mysterious, stopped in the middle of the stream of time and then filled with something neither he nor we know so that what is real and what is unreal change place. Packed with meaning, this character study is one of the most remarkable I have seen in recent years..."
Le Monde 01.10.1999
Michel Cournot
"Quelqu'un va venir"
Ce soir de théâtre est immense. L'auteur ouvre un autre chemin. C'est comme s'il nous équipait d'yeux et d'oreilles tout neufs. Pour cette ascension première, Claude Régy était le sherpa rêvé : sa vie n'aura été que raids dans l'inconnu. Oui, c'est un grand soir. Une date.
"Quelqu'un va venir." Des mots brefs. Qu'ils expriment l'espoir d'un enfant enseveli sous des gravats, ou au contraire le qui-vive d'un maquisard qui dévide son Bickford, ces mots ne disent que l'essentiel. Le peu de gestes, ici, ce soir, c'est la même chose : baisser la tête, lever la main, tout est dit.
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