Jon Fosse - Aliss at the Fire

For some, memories are like a rough stone worn smooth from years of handling, their edges softened and rounded as they are turned over and over in one's mind. There are events that seem so crisp and significant as they occur that it is difficult to think they will, like every other experience, drift away from immediate recollection, becoming hazy and indistinct, disappearing from one's day to day thoughts until they return, briefly excavated from the tomb of our past, to surface from the void for a fleeting moment until they vanish once more. The protagonist of Jon Fosse's Aliss at the Fire (trans. Damion Searls), Signe, has worn smooth the memory of her husband Asle, turning over their time together incessantly in her mind as the years stretch on and he doesn't return from his boating trip.

I don't know what I'm looking at, Asle says
But you're standing there in front of the window, Signe says
I am, Asle says
But you're not looking at anything, Signe says
No, Asle says
But why are you standing there then, Signe says
Yes I mean, she says
Yes are you thinking about something, she says
I'm not thinking about anything, Asle says
But what are you looking at, Signe says
I'm not looking at anything, Asle says
You don't know, Signe says
No, Asle says
You're just standing there, Signe says
Yes I'm just standing here, Asle says

This conversation, so ordinary on the surface, takes on an ominous tone once Asle has disappeared and she is left alone. It comes early in the story, beginning on page 6, and serves to highlight the dominant themes of Fosse's text. To begin with, this is a novella concerned with the very ordinary interactions shared between a man and a woman, and the conversation above is particularly banal. And yet – we know he is gone (and so done Signe), we know he isn't returning (and so does Signe), and we know that this was one of their last conversations together (and so, it goes without saying, does Signe). Read again, there's so much more to it than appears on the surface. Fosse eliminates the separations between their speech, removing periods, dialogue indicators, and having every sentence begin with speech and end with “Asle says” or “Signe says”. The effect is to create a rhythm, a rapid but unhurried back and forth that shows the intimacy and closeness of the characters, even though the words themselves strike the reader as distant, unemotional, and perhaps even cold. But take a minute – record a conversation with a loved one and keep an ear out for the banality and ordinariness of your conversation. It's all like that, the repetition, the needling, the pointless inquiry.

...why did he disappear, just stay gone, she thinks, he was always here, and then he just disappeared, and his boat, she thinks, was found floating in the middle of the fjord, empty, one dark fall evening, in late November, years and years ago, twenty-three years its been now, she thinks, 1979, a Tuesday, that's what happened, he never came back, and she thought that he was just staying out on the fjord a long time, she thinks, that he'd still come back, but the hours went by, hour after hour, no she can't bear to think about it, it's still so painful, she thinks, no she doesn't want to think about it, she thinks...

Later, when Asle leaves the active text as much as he has left Signe's life, the novella settles into a rhythm, mostly unbroken by paragraphs, and entirely devoid of periods. In fact, the final sentence of the story ends partway through, and though it doesn't explicitly link back to the beginning, we know that another hundred, another thousand pages could be written like this. Fosse's uses “she thinks” to break up the text provides a rhythm and becomes talismanic in its power. He uses it as a beat, striking the same chord over and over to imply that Signe is herself on constant repeat, that we just happened to have caught the current trend of her thoughts as they whirl, and once we leave they'll spin back around again, thinking, thinking, thinking, wondering about that day, contemplating their conversations and the way he looked before he left, and linking her husband's fate to his family's. She's stuck on an endless loop; Signe is a grooved record spinning silently in an abandoned room, turning and playing for no-one.

Fosse explores the cold mists of Signe's memory as she replays the significant days in her life that have led her to this moment, alone, lonely, aching for human contact but only for Asle, her vanished husband, gone so many years now, appropriated by time and by the frigid waters of the lake, her memory of him becoming confused with other memories, with stories he told, with meetings she hoped they had but never did, which parts of her memories of him are real now and which wishful thinking, and how can she trust what's inside her fragile, damaged, searching, bruised mind?

because this darkness, this endless darkness all the time now, she can't stand it, she thinks, and she has to say something to him, something, she thinks, and then it's as if nothing is what it was, she thinks, and she looks around the room and yes everything is what it was, nothing is different, why does she think that, that something is different? she thinks, why should anything be different? why would she think something like that? that anything could really be different? she thinks, because there he is standing in front of the window...

Midway through the novella Aliss at the Fire steps back in time, past Signe's memories, past Asle's memories but into his past, to view his family a century prior when, in similar tragic circumstances, a child drowned and was lost to the family. The style stays within Signe's “she thinks” writing but it deals with new characters, and acts as a parallel to and critique of Signe's handling of Asle's disappearance. In the past, the family experienced hardship but they continued on and eventually Asle was born; in the present, Signe has become paralysed with grief, unable to do anything more than replay and remember.

In short, Aliss at the Fire is a beautiful novella, written with such deep understanding for the melancholy feelings of loss and sadness that afflict us both as we live our lives and during moments of intense grief and their ramifications. It's use of “she thinks” keeps the story grounded as it spirals further into Signe's mind, and also acts as an evocative device that brings the text together as a cohesive whole. Time and memory are mutable, life is not a straight line, and there is more to a life than its retelling. Fosse has touched on the raw nerve endings of grief and regret, and this is the story he has come back with.

Author	Jon Fosse
Title	Aliss at the Fire (Original Title: Det er Ales)
Translator	Damion Searls
Nationality	Norwegian
Publisher	Dalkey Archive Press
Published	2010 (English) 2004 (Norwegian)
Pages	107
Availability: ---Amazon (US) ---Amazon (UK) ---Fishpond AU)

See Also

Other titles from The Dalkey Archive Press under review.

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