Madrid. The Spanish publisher Random House launches the novel in Spanish Ales by the bonfire, written by the 2023 Nobel Prize winner in Literature, the Norwegian Jon Fosse, with which this stamp complements its collection on this author, after his versions of Melancholia y Whiteness. As in the rest of his narrative work, in which theater and stories stand out, Fosse takes an introspective journey in which he uses the musicality of writing to find meaning in existence.
Jon Fosse, born in Norway in 1959, is gradually expanding the publications on his work in Spanish, with a good part of poetic, narrative and essayistic texts already published in our language.
Con Ales by the bonfire This background is further nourished, especially when it is a key text in the writer’s life, which he published for the first time in 2004 and in which he began an introspective journey with fjords and music as a backdrop.
The publishing label highlighted that this Fosse title is at the antipodes of literature understood as an exercise of expression and exhibition of the self; musicality and a certain distrust regarding the transparency of language are distinctive features of a work that, between narrative, theater and poetry, delineates a personal territory made of repetitions, a minimal language, silence and isolation, and a fjord landscape as beautiful as severe
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▲ Cover of Ales by the bonfire.Photo courtesy of Random House
The story opens with the image of its protagonist, Signe. Sitting in front of a window, she intersperses moments of apparent stillness with the loops of memory and thought as the background of a family saga in which, through resonances, the generations communicate.
In that space that Signe encompasses with a gaze tied to waiting for two decades, these moments converge, forming a genealogy in which the ghosts of the past collide with the living. And surrounding all of them is nature, which, unforgiving, imposes a constant struggle.
highlights.
Fosse is considered one of the most important authors of our time. His work has been translated into 40 languages and his plays have been performed around the world. He debuted in 1983 with the novel Red, black, and since then he has written more than 60 works including theater, novels, poetry, children’s stories and essays. He is also the author of Morning and Afternoon, Trilogy y septology, with which he was a finalist for the 2022 International Booker.