2024
A child is born; he will be named Johannes, and will be a fisherman. An old man dies; his name is Johannes, he was a fisherman. This novel, written with the concentrated power of poetry, spans these two extremes of a human life, its language entering into the very process of being born and that of dying, when everything remains the same and yet is completely different. Between these two points, Jon Fosse gives us the details of an entire life, starkly compressed. Beginning with Johannes’s father’s thoughts as his wife goes into labor, and ending with Johannes’s own thoughts as he embarks upon a day in his life when everything is exactly the same, yet totally different, Morning and Evening is a novel concerning the beautiful dream that our lives have meaning.
“Morning and Evening is a simple story about life’s most important questions—in fact, about nothing less than the meaning of life itself. Fosse conveys his speculations in profound and truly gripping language. It is almost impossible not to be brought deep into Johannes the fisherman’s world.”
“Jon 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.”
“A masterful short novel.”
Jon Fosse
Tove Breistein
