Jon Fosse interview: ‘I never had an intention to be an author’

Your Septology septet is written in your trademark style and could be described as a seven-part novel written in a single sentence. Could you explain what prompted you to structure the septet in this way and how you intended it to shape the reader’s experience? 

I prefer not to plan anything before I start writing. At a certain point I have a feeling that the novel is already written, and I just have to write it down before it disappears. 

When writing, I have to surprise myself, I have to create something I didn’t know before, such as the characters and the story. 

When I started out writing Septology, I had no plan to write a novel without full stops, but when writing I came into a flow that didn’t need any full stops. On the contrary, they would damage the flow. 

The language in The Other Name is also deeply poetic and rhythmic. How does your background in poetry – and writing for the stage – influence you when writing novels?  

I started out writing in my early teens, and at that time I was playing the guitar a lot, both electric guitar – in a band – and classical guitar. Then I suddenly stopped playing and started writing, and when writing I somehow tried to recreate the mood or atmosphere created while playing music. I guess this led me toward the musical side of language, especially writing in a certain rhythm, in a broad sense – the poetic way of using language. 

I have written a lot for the theatre, and it must also have influenced the way I write fiction. I guess my dialogues are much better now than in the novels I wrote before I had written for the stage. I think the same goes for establishing a situation. 

Existentialism, identity, faith, the passing of time and alternate versions of ourselves are recurring themes in your work. In The Other Name, there’s a duality between the two characters, both named Asle, and doppelgangers feature throughout. What draws you to these themes, and to explore identity through your work?  

As I said earlier, I don´t plan to write in this or that way, and the same goes for what I am writing about. It just happens that I write about this or that. Beckett said he didn’t write about anything, and I could say the same. What I write about I feel is part of, or perhaps identical to, the form. And to me literature is all about form. 

But of course, from another perspective, I write about something, about everything mentioned, and a lot more. Perhaps Nietzsche was right when he said that what is form to the writer is content to the reader. 

I studied philosophy, and concentrated on Martin Heidegger, especially Being and Time. This work, considered one of the main works of existentialism, influenced me a lot, and in fact I think it is the philosophy of Heidegger that has influenced my writing the most, more than any novel. 

Is there a book that changed the way you think about the novel, a book that made you reassess what’s possible when it comes to writing fiction, or that broadened your own horizons as a writer? 

Perhaps William Faulkner´s The Sound and the Fury. But when I tried to reread it again not so long ago, I felt at home in that novel, to put it that way. 

Which book you are currently reading, and what made you pick it up?   

I am reading, for what number of times I don´t know, Dante´s Divina Commedia. Partly because a new Norwegian translation has been published, and partly because earlier this summer I was given a prize called Dante´s Laurel, in the church in Ravenna Dante is buried next to. 

Is there a book that you return to time and time again – an older work or classic that you’ve read on multiple occasions? What makes you keep going back to it? Do you find different things in it each time? 

Divina Commedia. I guess it is simply because I am trying to understand this book. And keep trying again and again. Another one is of course the Bible.