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.