Morning and Evening – the Nobel laureate’s mystical account of where we begin and end

Yagnishsing Dawoor in The Guardian:

The second part, chiefly told from Johannes’s point of view, chronicles the eerie hours after he wakes up one morning, late in his old age. Johannes is a now retired fisherman. His wife, Erna, is long dead. His mornings are “sad and lonely”. Johannes makes coffee. He steps out of the house and everything he beholds seems different somehow. He meets his dead neighbour, and good friend Peter, and they go fishing. Johannes later bumps into his daughter Signe and “is seized with deep despair, because Signe cannot see him or hear him”. At the tale’s close, Peter accompanies Johannes to a place where nothing hurts and “everything you love is there”.

Fosse has a precious ear for the muted whimpers of grief; there are such depths of ache contained in this brief novel. That we begin the journey of dying as soon as we are born may be one of this book’s most effectively dramatised insights, but it succeeds, no less brilliantly, in conveying late-life pain and melancholia; what the days feel like once friends and lovers are gone and we have but our own vanishing selves for company.

More here.

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