W.G. Sebald’s leftovers – Campo Santo

As a reader, W.G. Sebald seems to have loved what is marginal and passed over. It only seems fair then, that after his death in a road accident in late 2001 we should be able to peruse his own marginal works and see what light they throw upon his major ones. Campo Santo is a collection of essays and prose pieces, of which the latter are far more interesting than the former. Snarky readers who know Sebald already may ask what the difference between an essay and “prose” is for Sebald, given that his “fiction” is already strangely essayistic and impressionistic, akin to very wise travelogues. The answer that comes out here is that in the prose the narrator is in the world, instead of merely contemplating it. In other words, he has legs.

Composed between The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz, and which may had Sebald lived longer have come together as another book close to the former in approach, but which instead bob like buoys, disconnected and out at sea, the four prose pieces set in Corsica are the best part of Campo Santo. I read them not only because I now love Sebald, but also because I wanted to see whether perhaps in these pieces the carefully constructed machinery underlying his novels might be more visible. Sebald is one of those writers whose prose seems deceptively simple, thoughtless even, and it was only with equal care and attention that I could shake that impression when I first read him.

Sebald is all about mood. He describes a world we recognise as our own while somehow making it sinister, unnerving, uncanny and tinted with melancholy. “A Little Excursion to Ajaccio” is a case in point. This, the first of the prose pieces, begins with the kind of sentence that makes you do a double take, so far from Sebald’s towering reputation does it seem:

In September last year, during a two-week holiday on the island of Corsica, I took a blue bus one day down the west coast to Ajaccio to spend a little time looking around the town, of which I knew nothing except that it was the birthplace of the Emperor Napoleon.

Certainly, there’s a sense of potential mystery – what will this town hold – but the main word I’d use to describe this sentence is “banal”. I could write it or its like. Here you go:

“In the beginning of May, taking advantage of the generous German public holidays that month and feeling a certain unease at the thought of another weekend spent at my new home in the Ruhr region, I took two trains and a ferry north to the island of Norderney, of which I knew nothing other than that it was where the poet Heine had composed his cycle of prose and poems “Die Nordsee”.”

If we hoped that the “something more” would come at once from Sebald, we are disappointed by the information in the subsequent sentence that it “it was a beautiful, sunlit day”, and a description of the palms swaying. Our first sense of something possibly being off is “a snow-white cruise ship” which looks “like a great iceberg”. Here, at last, do we have something out of place – an iceberg in Corsica. It’s not startling by any stretch, but it is odd enough that we might notice the image half-consciously. “Dark, tunnel-like entrances” to houses, the houses themselves like “citadels”, give further images that, especially through their contrast with the charming day, serve that Sebaldian unease.

Sebald works his moods upon us less by shock than by a gradual accumulation of things half-noticed, unimportant in themselves but which by contrast with a safe or sanitised version of reality, the one we ourselves normally perceive, send us off-kilter. Within “A Little Excursion to Ajaccio” we have women who seem to look like Napoleon, another one who looks dead while she sits in her chair, and a certain absence of people generally, an emptiness and darkness to contrast with the light, colour, and babble we normally associate with travel.

Unease also comes from the narrator himself, whose voice is decidedly slippery. He starts talking about an image of Napoleon, describing his situation and even his emotions, only to begin the next paragraph with a lurch – “Or so at least we might conclude from an article in Corse-Matin published on the day of my visit”. What we had trusted to be his voice was only his mediation.

We jump from normality to the strange, from voice to voice, but also from time to time. Within this piece alone we go from the present to Kafka in 1911, to Flaubert visiting the same museum as the narrator, to “Mary and Joseph”, and of course to Napoleon himself. If Sebald’s narrators do not live horizontally, in the sense that they struggle to connect to humans around them, they do however live vertically through time, endlessly connecting to past figures and ideas as intimates and friends, or at least frames of reference. This, too, is hardly typical, and encourages the reader to see the world the same way.

Once we are seeing as Sebald did, he can start encouraging us also to share a more specific view, beyond just unease and scepticism of his sources – his pessimism. “The unfathomable misfortune of life” is how he names it here, but other similar phrases are scattered throughout, not so often as to be overwhelming yet unmissably there. One way this is justified is through violence, overt in places, but more often bubbling.

At the end of the first prose piece, a bomb goes off – it is Corsica after all. The second piece talks about burial practices, but also the banditry of Corsica. The third details the devastating effects of hunting and logging on the original ecosystems of the island, and local inhabitants’ inability to connect the consequences to their own actions. Such violence is blatant. Once we start thinking in terms of violence we are able to pick up its more subtle traces, such as in the manias affecting various figures (including at times the narrator himself). Or even, in a description like this:

Before leaving the museum I went down to the basement, where there is a collection of Napoleonic mementos and devotional items on display. It includes objects adorned with the head and initials of Napoleon—letter openers, seals, penknives, and boxes for tobacco and snuff—miniatures of the entire clan and most of their descendants, silhouettes and biscuit medallions, an ostrich egg painted with an Egyptian scene, brightly colored faïence plates, porcelain cups, plaster busts, alabaster figures, a bronze of Bonaparte mounted on a dromedary, and also, beneath a glass dome almost as tall as a man, a moth-eaten uniform tunic cut like a tailcoat, edged with red braid and bearing twelve brass buttons: l’habit d’un colonel des Chasseurs de la Garde, que porta Napoléon Ier (The uniform of a colonel in the Chasseurs de la Garde, worn by Napoleon I).

Sebald’s reading, his mood, his drifting gaze, draw us into a way of looking where we cannot read this description of a typical museum’s clutter without seeing in it a certain horror. How did an ostrich egg reach Corsica? Certainly, we might innocently say trade, but in the context of Napoleon it’s much easier, and probably more correct, to say imperialism. Perhaps the “Egyptian scene” is ancient, rather than Napoleonic – it’s much harder to say the same about Napoleon riding a camel. The pointless military adventure to Egypt is not mentioned, but a knowing reader cannot but think of it. The colonel’s uniform is more explicitly related to violence, but like all the others it is something apparently innocuous which, chosen and placed alongside the others in this paragraph, becomes transparent so that we see the blood behind it.

Such a paragraph, such a working of associations, perhaps exemplifies Sebald’s project. Indeed, in one of Campo Santo’s essays there is a telling remark on “my method of procedure: in adhering to an exact historical perspective, in patiently engraving and linking together apparently disparate things in the manner of a still life.” That, ultimately, is how Sebald’s prose works. Every comment, or rather cut, whether deep or shallow, obvious or subtle, works to advance his world upon us. And since that prose seems to be both factual, with the vast erudition implied by its author, while also being highly authentic, for here the narrator is in the world and experiencing and sharing it with us, the whole book seems silky and very seductive.

Yet still, once we read the other essays of Campo Santo we might find a certain tension, should we return to the prose pieces. Sebald praises this objective, reporter-like style, saying “the ideal of truth contained in the form of an entirely unpretentious report proves to be the irreversible foundation of all literary effort” precisely because it prevents the “human faculty of suppressing any memories that might in some way be an obstacle to the continuance of life”. However, once we see the work that goes into constructing this memory-preserving prose, it’s hard to see it as anything objective anymore. If we still see the narrator as a charming guide to the world, now we see Sebald himself, furiously stabbing at his stone – what we have here is rather extremely subjective, but well masked. And what do we make of the fact that the narrator, though as obsessed with memory as the man who wrote him, remains as silent as the latter on his own past and personal life?

The excitement of Sebald is that he teaches us how to read and look anew upon the world, finding the violence and horror of history behind the slightest of objects. We come away with a greater sense of memory, its passage and the challenges of its conservation. Inevitably though, we must turn that same critical eye back towards the man who made the prose. How far can we trust a man who has such knowledge, yet is so little of the earth itself? We like mysteries, and Sebald himself provides them in his work and also in his person. The recent, in literary terms, scandals (for example here and here) over the biography of Sebald written by Carole Angier and its revelations concerning where Sebald blurred the lines between truth and fiction suggest that these mysteries are unlikely to disappear any time soon.

Alice Munro – Dear Life

I bought my copy of Dear Life, the last collection of short stories by the late Canadian writer Alice Munro, right about when she won the Nobel Prize in 2013 (one of the first times a writer of short stories had received that honour). I must have read a few of the stories then, not enjoyed or understood them, and set the book aside. On a whim I brought it back with me to Germany, hoping that being a bit older and wiser might help me understand things, and sure enough devoured it in a week.

It’s a hard thing to write about, though. Munro’s stories seem technically simple compared to other writers, where I’m always dotting the pages with marginal notes. Despite this simplicity, you read one page at a time with the ease of a bird gliding and then suddenly, probably at the end, she tries to leave you devastated and usually succeeds.

There are even few images to get excited about. The only one I remember, of “evergreens, rolled up like sleepy bears”, I did not like.

Instead, one of Munro’s key skills on a sentence-by-sentence level seems her ability to find a sharp way of phrasing those moments that change a life: “”Just leaving,” says Alister, the man sitting beside me who was going to marry but now is not going to marry me.“ Or “That was one of  the few times that I saw him act like a father.”

With such sentences, you get the impression that she has worked hard at her stories, unlike others who mask relative laziness with sheer talent or genius. It takes a lot of effort, hours of chiselling and sanding, to make such unobtrusive workaday prose. Or rather, prose that we cannot distinguish from other simple prose except when it is too late, and it has already delivered its broadside against the unprepared soul.

My favourite of the stories here is “Amundsen”, from which the bear image comes. Its story goes as follows. A young woman arrives to teach at a clinic for children with diseases like tuberculosis, out in rural Canada. She falls in love with Alister, the director, and they arrange to get married. Something happens, however, and they do not. The narrator is set on a train and leaves. Years later she sees Alister again, but barely has time to say hello.

Taken as a whole, “Amundsen” reminds me a little bit of Chekhov’s “House with the Mezzanine” with its sense of a relationship that does not go anywhere. Chekhov’s realist innovation (one of them) was that he translated his observation of unfulfilled promises within individuals’ lives into his fiction. Munro, often called the Canadian Chekhov, gains much of her own atmosphere of reality from this same thing. She is, like Chekhov, a great writer of the fudged life.

The pivotal moment in “Amundsen” is the scene when, having left the clinic to get married in a far off town, the mood suddenly shifts between the couple and they head back, acknowledging that everything is over. Here is that shift in mood. The couple have just eaten, and now the narrator has plucked up the courage to put on a nice dress she had saved especially:

When I come out Alister stands up to greet me and smiles and squeezes my hand and says I look pretty.

We walk stiffly back to the car, holding hands. He opens the car door for me, goes around and gets in, settles himself and turns the key in the ignition, then turns it off.

The car is parked in front of a hardware store. Shovels for snow removal are on sale at half price. There is still a sign in the window that says skates can be sharpened inside.

Across the street there is a wooden house painted an oily yellow. Its front steps have become unsafe and two boards forming an X have been nailed across them.

The truck parked in front of Alister’s car is a prewar model, with a runningboard and a fringe of rust on its fenders. A man in overalls comes out of the hardware store and gets into it. After some engine complaint, then some rattling and bouncing in place, it is driven away. Now a delivery truck with the store’s name on it tries to park in the space left vacant. There is not quite enough room. The driver gets out and comes and raps on Alister’s window. Alister is surprised—if he had not been talking so earnestly he would have noticed the problem. He rolls down the window and the man asks if we are parked there because we intend to buy something in the store. If not, could we please move along?

“Just leaving,” says Alister, the man sitting beside me who was going to marry me but now is not going to marry me. “We were just leaving.”

We. He has said we. For a moment I cling to that word. Then I think it’s the last time. The last time I’ll be included in his we.

It’s not the “we” that matters, that is not what tells me the truth. It’s his male-to-male tone to the driver, his calm and reasonable apology. I could wish now to go back to what he was saying before, when he did not even notice the van trying to park. What he was saying then had been terrible but his tight grip on the wheel, his grip and his abstraction and his voice had pain in them. No matter what he said and meant, he spoke out of the same deep place then, that he spoke from when he was in bed with me. But it is not so now, after he has spoken to another man. He rolls up the window and gives his attention to the car, to backing it out of its tight spot and moving it so as not to come in contact with the van.

And a moment later I would be glad even to go back to that time, when he craned his head to see behind him. Better that than driving—as he is driving now—down the main street of Huntsville, as if there is no more to be said or managed.

I can’t do it, he has said.

He has said that he can’t go through with this.

He can’t explain it.

Only that it’s a mistake.

The first time I read it, I was shocked by the news that everything was over. (Shocked by the suddenness, but also because I wanted the marriage to happen.) Yet when we look back over the extract, there are no clues that things are going wrong of the sort that another clever short-story writer might feel compelled to leave. Even going back further, the occasional unkindnesses of the story, such as when the narrator and Alister skip the play of a school-aged friend, Mary, are not “gotcha” moments that we can use to explain what comes later. Adults preferring to spend time together over a meal to watching a performance that will probably be no good is hardly a cardinal sin we cannot ever imagine ourselves committing.

Instead, though we do have words like “stiffly” and the perhaps insufficiently thoughtful “pretty”, the passage before the revelation strikes us by having nothing to do with the marriage at all. We have a “wooden house” and the “hardware store.” It takes us until the man tapping on the window, and the knowledge that Alister is “talking so earnestly”, for us to realise that the reason we are focusing on everything else but what is taking place within the car is that the narrator herself wants to focus on anything else but that. Rather than the text reflecting the narrator’s internal voice, a la free indirect discourse, instead, we have the text reflecting the narrator’s very thoughts. It’s pretty cool, but also the kind of unflashy trick typical of Munro which it took me a second pass to notice. 

We never learn the reason that things collapse between them. Ultimately, it does not matter. Perhaps this is another thing Munro has the right to allow herself – a lack of an explanation. As in relationships, often the only explanation for a break-up is the one that we come up with, alone at night.

Another trick worth borrowing is the use of dialogue without quotes, as at the end of the extract. By placing it in the text in this way the finality, the unchangeability of the fact is emphasised, as against the dialogue within quotation marks which still has this element of hope. I think this is important to note because it can be easy to get sucked into quite a conservative way of thinking, particularly on “realistic” things, which considers that every innovation has already taken place. I know I’m guilty of it. But dialogue is more than just words in quotes. (Just as, for the Sally Rooneys and James Joyces of this world, it can be more than words without quotes!) Dialogue can be silences, like “…”, or shock “!?”, and so on. This may seem rather dreadful to some of my readers, but I think that such a way of writing “dialogue” could be more effective now than the more traditional “She went silent”. Show, not tell, we are told, after all.

Reading the stories in Dear Life is at once a joy and a sadness and a consolation for this blogger. A joy, because they are damn good. A sadness, because I know how vastly far ahead of anything I could ever notice, let alone write down, Munro’s knowledge of human nature is. And a consolation, because that previous statement is at least a little silly. More and more, whether as a psychological defence (you will still be a good writer, don’t give up!) or as a rational position, I’m coming to see how challenging it is to write good stories when you are young. I felt this many years ago, when I literally could not write any kind of time gap in my stories – not even, really, a week – because it felt like I hadn’t lived long enough to perceive time in that way. But still now, when I have lived long enough to allow for a changing of the seasons, I see that I have not seen enough of life’s stages to really write the kind of modern story that rolls itself out slowly, in fits and starts, like modern lives do.

Of course, there remain plenty of stories for the young, but not ones about whole lives. And it is precisely this kind of story that Munro chooses for her own in most of Dear Life. At around eighty when these stories came out, she was certainly entitled to it. But it’s still a surprise, and a powerful one, when we read in a story that began in the time of the Second World War, the news that characters are reaching out to one another over “email”.

I think I might have to live a lot longer to write something like that.

Jon Fosse – Scenes from a Childhood

Jon Fosse’s collection of shorter pieces, Scenes from a Childhood, contains prose so dreadful I would be embarrassed to put my own name next to it. I loved Septology and Aliss at the Fire, but the quality gap between those works and this one is titanic. I also do mean that word “quality”, because this blog has seen plenty of works that I did not enjoy grace its (web) pages, such as most recently Handke’s Goalie’s Anxiety, works in which nevertheless I was able to find literary merit and interesting ideas. Scenes from a Childhood is just shockingly bad, however. The words are bad, the style dead, the ideas thin. There’s a chance that in writing this post I might succeed in redeeming the book in my eyes, but I think the more likely outcome is that by seeing the negatives, we might instead understand how to do better.

Scenes from a Childhood is a hodgepodge of prose from throughout Fosse’s career. “How it Started” is a story of first love; Scenes from a Childhood collects various semi-autobiographical vignettes from Fosse’s own life, most no more than half a page; “And Then My Dog Will Come Back To Me” is a revenge fantasy where the narrator’s dog is killed by a neighbour, so the narrator murders the neighbour; “Dreamt in Stone” seems to be about epilepsy and God; finally, “Little Sister” recounts a few events in the life of a very small boy. The collection is not uniformly bad, with “How it Started” being a particular highlight. However, generally, the quality really is this low.

Scenes from a Childhood

We can take a look at Scenes from a Childhood as representative of the bad tendencies here. After all, it has given its name to the collection. Even with just Septology under our belts, we can recognise images and scenes from that work, done here too. (Old sheds, certain cafes and characters, teen bands, a dying grandmother). Unlike Septology, however, Fosse’s prose entirely lacks magic here.

Take a random example:

ASLE WANTS A DOG OF HIS OWN

On Sundays when he was little Asle and his parents used to go for walks. They used to walk past a little house and the man who lived there had a little white dog with black spots. Whenever they walked past the house the dog leaped over to Asle, who patted it and talked to it. Asle wants a dog for himself so badly but his mother says he can’t have one. Asle wants a dog of his own.

I want to make clear from the start that this is not the shortest, nor the simplest of the stories. Many others are worse. This one is representative of them, however, in style. We have here simple sentences, reflecting perhaps the relatively simple consciousness of Asle’s experience (sometimes we have an “I” instead). There is none of that flowing consciousness expressed through run-on sentences which we are used to from Septology or Aliss, just declarative sentences without any energy behind them at all. Those aspects of Fosse’s work that work brilliantly when enveloped in the mystical power of those breath-like sentences in those stories, instead are unexciting here – for example, his repetition of the word “dog”. In normal prose, repetition can quickly become monotony.

And what of the ideas? Asle sees a dog and wants one but can’t have one. Each of the scenes in Scenes from a Childhood is similar to this. Asle rides a bike and likes it. Asle reads a book and likes it. Asle is nervous about playing at a concert with friends. The problem with these stories is that they are flat. There is only ever one idea at a time, one single moment from the narrator’s past which can only be interpreted emotionally: this happened, and this was how he felt. Such an approach means we cannot actually think about these stories, because there is nothing at all to think about.

Rather than, as my blurb claims, these stories showing short prose “occasions some of [Fosse’s] greatest works”, we see that by paring down the stories and depriving them of any length, the result is utterly discardable. There is no accumulation of images to give even the mundane its strength. There’s no rhythm to the prose to let it wash over us. And there is no depth to the content, which after all can be gained in a pinch by letting us look at the same puddle from different angles. Without length, the puddle has to be deep, for we only have one angle to look at it from.

What, we might desperately ask, of the topic? Is this not so relatable? This is the weakest defence a book can have. Indeed, as a child (and now) I have felt anxious, or excited, or wanted things I cannot have. Even, growing up in rural Scotland, a few of the scenarios in Scenes from a Childhood were familiar to me in their specifics. But relatability is never an end, only a means. Relatability brings us in; good literature takes that closeness and does something with that, like revealing some tension or strain under the surface of our lives. Fosse here does not do this. He just writes something we know and stops. The problem is that relatability is easy. It’s how popular music, art, and literature works. Nothing against them, but Fosse needs to do more, both with his prose and with his ideas, than happens here.

“And Then My Dog Will Come Back To Me”

“And Then My Dog Will Come Back To Me” is quite a different work. The novella is much longer than everything else in the collection, and since it involves murder, it is less likely to be something we as readers relate to from our personal histories. However, those of us with pets might not struggle to imagine murdering anyone who hurt or killed them.

In any case, the novella is strange, and if nothing else a feat of imagination, at least it appears so. The man’s dog is shot, and one neighbour says it was another neighbour. When the man goes home, he sees his dog, dead, on the porch. At night the man gets on his boat, rows to the other neighbour’s house and stabs him with a pitchfork dipped in manure, before returning home. He digs a grave for the dog, speaks with a few neighbours, and then the story finishes with him admitting to the initial neighbour who told him of the murder that he did it.

If this sounds exciting or tense, it is not. As with the stories in Scenes from a Childhood itself, the dominant note is monotony. The dog dies, and the narrator is filled with a murderous rage. For the next twenty or thirty pages this is the single emotional note of the novella. We see quickly how little variety there is in such an emotion. “That fucker’s gonna die tonight” is repeated, over and over, until the neighbour does indeed die. No images of rage, no torrents or torments, just hate directed towards the neighbour until (and after) he is dead. It is actually not very exciting, and again – we sit there wondering if there is anything at all to interpret. There’s no motivation for the dog’s murder, just as there’s no complexity to the revenge. As a reader, you’re faced with the uncomfortable thought that there’s nothing to think about as you turn the pages.

Once the murder is complete the narrator behaves irrationally, failing to bury his dog and answering questions from his other neighbours in a way that would immediately throw suspicion upon him. There are moments of tenderness towards the dead dog, and moments of madness where the narrator seems confused about where the dog went after he has buried him. The tenderness is touching, and almost hints at a kind of metaphysical aspect to the story which the rest of the text does not really cater to:

“…I’m standing with the dog in my arms and rocking him back and forth like a baby and I say you have to go away now, far away, but it’s somewhere where it isn’t cold, it isn’t freezing, you need to go away now and I have to go now, I can’t stay standing like this, I have to just go, now, you’ll wait for me, I’ll be coming soon, you’ll be excited and wag your tail when I get there, because I’m coming too, soon now, it won’t be long…”

In general, however, the story just does not withstand any inspection. There are no motives to analyse, no nuances to the narrator’s emotions and only limited rationality to his actions. As far as literary murders go, it just does not do anything interesting. The prose has its moments, but that is the best I can say for it.

“How it Started”

The story I liked best in the collection is “How it Started”, which has much in common with Scenes from a Childhood. What separates them is the prose, which is vastly more musical, and which also gestures towards far more than does that other work. “How it Started” is about the first flush of teenage love or infatuation. Other stories covered the same, but merely described the scene. Here, prose and theme merge:

…when we ran up to the big attic, lay down on the floor, and when the others came running in, when the girls came in, when that girl in particular came in.

When she came in.

When she came in from break…

Here the repetition is conscious, rather than the result of (apparent) laziness. It reflects the shock and the butterflies in the chest, the break in the world’s continuity when someone we so earnestly want to notice us has come in and we can no longer sit idly but must take ourselves and be our best.

The prose also now flows:

When she came in from break, from all the breaks when you’d seen her, when she came in with her long hair, those small breasts just barely visible under her shirt, when she came running up the stairs and you knew that you’d never dare talk to her, as you wrestled and shouted there on the floor, playing with Geir or another one of your friends, when she came in you calmed down, you stopped kicking your legs, you stopped fooling around, joking, shouting, you calmed down, you were a bit embarrassed, you got up from the floor and suddenly you didn’t know where to go or what to do with yourself, your heart grew troubled because now she was there, she was near you, with her hair, her body, she was just a few yards away from you, so close, and you couldn’t talk to her even though she’d sent word to you two days before, even though one of her girlfriends had come up to you, giggling, and said she was supposed to say hi to you from her, from her, from her, the girl with the long hair. When she stood there, calmly, talking to one of the other girls, up in the half-dark attic at the pastor’s farm, with the other kids who went to youth group, and we all did, almost all the kids in the area went, when she stood there with her new breasts, her long hair, and she smiled at her girlfriend, and you stood there, stood there alone while the others wrestled, and felt a sadness grow large inside you, that was probably when it actually started.

That was when the music came to you.

There and then it came, and it’s never left.

I’ve quoted generously because this is finally good prose. It reflects a consciousness – anxious, excited. And it also shows more than just a scene by giving a sense of consequences – “that was probably when it actually started”. I presume this is the ability to write (as music standing in for creativity in general), but it might just as much be simply love. Either way, we have a sense of something higher, some significance stretching beyond the scene.

This nervous enraptured consciousness envelopes the prose. It brings us closer to the narrator and his struggle. For the first time, we have tension, which can grow over the story’s length because rather than a single paragraph we have five whole pages. We also, finally, have a sense of perspective, by which I mean that we can look onwards to higher meanings and consequences for a whole life. “And Then My Dog Will Come Back To Me” might have had this, but instead the narrator’s mind is so focused on revenge that there’s no opportunity for any kind of thought or reflection. Here is how “How it Started” ends:

That was how it started, in the dark, the rain, on a road along a shore, there were waves always beating, and skin that grew bigger and bigger. Her kiss was a mark on my skin, it was like it entered into my body and stayed there. She’s married now, her kids are grown, she’s a housewife and she usually goes to village parties with her husband. They were there the summer we played at the village party. She was there, but her body is more shapeless now. Her hair is short. Her breasts have grown much bigger.

This is magic prose because, like the kiss, it sticks with us. There’s more than what I’ve quoted, of course, but I hope here is enough to give a sense of the power of that moment when they kiss in the dark, and how that moment becomes indelible even as time passes.

Conclusion

All of this raises awkward questions, however. If the only thing separating “How it Started” from Scenes from a Childhood is long flowing sentences and a few ambiguous phrases that point towards something of higher significance, then doesn’t that almost devalue Fosse’s whole work? Or, at least, doesn’t it say that we can just do the same by taking anything mediocre we write about our own lives and removing the full stops to whip it into something Fossean with no difficulty?

In that case, of course, it would be obvious who we are imitating. Originality counts for something, so that most modern autobiographical prose seems just waiting to have “Sebaldean” slapped on it, and any kind of ranting prose at all will forever be indebted to Bernhard for blazing the trail. The precise way that Fosse builds up his rhythms and repetitions is not just casual or the work of a hack, and combining long sentences and repetitions with hints of the higher requires talent well deserving of the Nobel Committee’s praise.

From the perspective of someone looking for what to read, however, this collection is clearly not where Fosse’s talents are best displayed. Most of the stories here really do seem too easily written and too lacking in depth.