Jon Fosse

The Nobel Prize by Jorge Fernandez

ANOTHER RESPONSE TO JON FOSSE’S NOBEL PRIZE WIN

(c/o nobelprize.org)

What is the point of life?

To be remembered. To be recognized. Accepted. The Nobel Prize is an attempt to answer that question. Legend says that Alfred Nobel funded the prize after reading an untimely published obituary about his life. Dynamite tycoon. He didn’t want to be remembered that way.  He didn’t like that that was how others viewed him.

Today, no one knows about Alfred Nobel and where his wealth originated from. They know about the Nobel Prize, and they think good things. Nobel used to mean dynamite, now it means excellence. The pinnacle of prestige.

Jon Fosse is a great writer. A bright seal of approval has been stamped onto his name. Nobel Laureate. Lauded by his peers and just the right amount of fame to go along with it. His writing will be immortalized in books crowded into shelves. Under each title will be his name and that seal. Winner of the Nobel Prize.

If that will suffice to be remembered, God only knows. 

-Jorge E. Fernandez De Mar

Jon Fosse: Reaction by Michael Maiello

FAST RESPONSE TO JON FOSSE NAMED 2023 NOBEL PRIZE WINNER FOR LITERATURE

Jon Fosse Foto: Tom A. Kolstad

Strandebarm, Norway is home to the Fosse Foundation, a mysterious collective of fjord-dwelling scholars dedicated to the study of the novels, essays and plays of Jon Fosse, your 2023 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Fosse Foundation exists online in English only in Merve Emre’s 2022 New Yorker profile, published as Fosse’s 7-volume “novel in a single sentence” was published in English. Artists need support from readers, admirers, patrons and proselytizers. Whether the Fosse Foundation is a book club or a literati illuminati, Fosse found an audience that cares, and assembled. That’s an accomplishment. Fosse’s work is widely celebrated in Europe, so he is not as obscure as he might seem to American audiences. Still, American writers remain a mystery to the Nobellers, who have not recognized a U.S. writer since Bob Dylan in 2016 and who missed Philip Roth despite more than half a century of opportunities. There is joy, at least, in little Strandebarm, and aquavit toasts to the literary champion of the Fosse Foundation.

-Michael Maiello