Praise for Jon Fosse
“I hesitate to compare the experience of reading these works to the act of meditation. But that is the closest I can come to describing how something in the critical self is shed in the process of reading Fosse, only to be replaced by something more primal. A mood. An atmosphere. The sound of words moving on a page.” — The New York Review of Books
“Fosse’s way of ‘painting’ pictures in words is gripping and truly different from what can be found in any other literature. ... A simplified universe full of wonder, intensity, and warm humor.”— Bergens Tidende
“Jon Fosse is a major European writer.”—Karl Ove Knausgaard
“The Beckett of the twenty-first century.”— Le Monde
“Jon Fosse is less well-known in America than some other Norwegian novelists, but revered in Norway – winner of every prize, a leading Nobel contender. I think of the four elder statesmen of Norwegian letters as a bit like the Beatles: Per Petterson is the solid, always dependable Ringo; Dag Solstad is John, the experimentalist, the ideas man; Karl Ove Knausgaard is Paul, the cute one; and Fosse is George, the quiet one, mystical, spiritual, probably the best craftsman of them all ... His writing is pure poetry.”—The Paris Review, from an essay by the translator
“Fosse has been compared to Ibsen and to Beckett, and it is easy to see his work as Ibsen stripped down to its emotional essentials. But it is much more. For one thing, it has a fierce poetic simplicity.”—The New York Times
“With its heavy silences and splintered dialogue, his work has reminded some of Beckett, others of Pinter.”—The Guardian
“Fosse’s prose . . . builds out of an ambiguity and sparseness and moves with a slow poetic intensity . . . The collection has all the hallmarks of Fosse’s signature brooding manner where lyrical precision is used to paint unmoored psyches. An accumulation of moments when our essential emotions come into conflict with experience, Scenes from a Childhood is a welcome – if overdue – introduction to a singular literary voice.”—Tank
“Fosse writes about the complexity and danger of the bleak Norwegian countryside as well as he writes about the passage of time through a life. In choosing to mostly focus on pieces about childhood, Searls has been able to show an impressive side to Fosse, because – in my experience at least – writing engaging prose about childhood trips up many otherwise competent writers. ... Fosse understands that a child’s mind is not merely the mind of an ignorant adult, it is a different form of consciousness entirely: more curious, more optimistic, less scared. ... There are portraits of great happiness, great pleasure and great joy in Scenes From A Childhood.”—Berfrois
“Fosse’s vignettes beautifully reclaim the revelations and deceptions of growing up, the punishments both arbitrary and well-earned, the lust for freedom expressed through the smallest transgressions and pettiest rebellions, the incompetence, the cluelessness, the joy and the pain, all of it twice-distilled in its clarity and intensity.”—Asymptote
“Fosse’s style—straightforward, unembellished, but ranging from the concisely spelled out to the more rambling stream-of-(troubled-)consciousness— is crisp and beautifully polished’— Complete Review
“Undoubtedly one of the world’s most important and versatile literary voices.”—Irish Examiner
“He has a surgeon’s ability to use the scalpel and to cut into the most prosaic, everyday happenings, to tear loose fragments from life, to place them under the microscope and examine them minutely, in order to present them afterward... sometimes so endlessly desolate, dark, and fearful that Kafka himself would have been frightened.”—Aftenposten
