I’ve been hearing friends praise Fosse for awhile, so when he won the Nobel I was like OK FINE, I’LL READ HIM. I wasn’t quite willing to tackle Septology, but discovered this 45-page option and thought, well, I can devote a morning to this. Joke’s on me, it took me a month to read.
There’s a Beckettian quality to it — melancholic, slightly unreal, grimly humorous — but it’s also decidedly… Scandinavian. It’s not an easy read, by any means, though it has a sort of hypnotic, incantatory flow that does pull you along (the translator deserves credit for that as well!). You really feel that Fosse is a playwright: though I can’t imagine how this could be staged, the overall experience is somehow like that of watching figures moving through around a stage as you’re watching from the dark (the book’s cover is perfect). But the way that all the moments in time keep collapsing onto each other, and the dead and the living intermingle; the eeriness of it all, somehow it made me think of Grotowski. I wish I could have sat still and really devoted myself fully to the experience.
Kasia Reads 