Morning and Evening, the latest novel by the Norwegian Nobel laureate Jon Fosse to be published in English, is a slim book, but it was a big deal when it first appeared in his home country in 2000. It was nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize, one of the most prestigious Scandinavian literary awards, and although Fosse didn’t win it, he told his local paper that the nomination had given him ‘a push to write more novels’. In the past, he felt, things had been ‘a bit skewed’ towards his work as a dramatist. Only his plays seemed to get any ‘buzz’. But he considered himself a good novelist. 

Viewed in retrospect, Morning and Evening is a pivotal book. It not only inspired Fosse to dedicate himself to fiction. It also introduced the unusual punctuation style and mode of storytelling that he would later deploy in his magnum opus, Septology (published in three volumes between 2019 and 2021 in Norway and as a single volume in English in 2022). From Morning and Evening on, there are no full stops and few line breaks in Fosse’s prose. And as in Septology, almost everything takes the form of an elderly man’s stream of consciousness. The man lives by a fjord on the west coast of Norway. When he isn’t pining for hand-rolled cigarettes or hearty, traditional cuisine, he is contemplating life, death and God.

In Morning and Evening, the man is called Johannes (an allusion to John the Baptist), and the book begins with a prologue in which he is born. Johannes’s father, Olai, seeing the child lying on his wife’s breast, figures that ‘he has probably never entirely understood women, there is something they