Status Updates From Das ist Alise (German Edition)

This is the second work I read by Jon Fosse (I read A Shining first) and this won’t be my last. I really love his writing and the stream of consciousness makes it all very readable. I think I’ll read A Silent Language: The Nobel Lecture before or Morning and Evening or some other short(er) work before delving into Septology (though I am very excited to read it).

inaction.

I love how stifling the narrator’s ennui and despair were. There was always an urgent sense that she has to do something, yet she stays there, lying on the bench and sees herself, her old (or rather young) self standing there at the window, staring at the darkness and waiting, endlessly waiting for Asle to come home. It describes depression brilliantly. The need to do something, yet being stuck in the quagmire of

I loved it! There’s something to Fosse’s writing that puts me in mind of Silent Hill or Alan Wake (mostly the former) it might be the restless grief permeating the story or the way time distorts itself inside the narrator’s (Signe’s) head and her endless wait for something (or someone) that would not come. The past bleeds into the present, which then bleeds into the future.

What a rollercoaster!

“she is just there without being there, the days come, the days go, nights come, nights go, and she goes along with them, moving slowly, without letting anything leave much of a trace or make much of a difference”