Jon Fosse’s writing is truly inspiring to me. The distinctness of his incantatory voice is entrancing, magic as a modern day Beckett. Like his other works, Scenes from a Childhood reads like pure poetry, despite being essentially a collection of flash fiction, short stories, and little novellas.
There are five sections in Scenes from a Childhood. The first retains the same title as the collection and offers a kind of semi-fictive memoir through a series of vignettes. “How It Started” is a tender, more extended short story of a boy’s first kiss with a girl. Fosse navigates the complexity of feelings of young teenagers and the imagery is absolutely stunning. “Dreamt in Stone” is about witnessing a slow avalanche and imagining all the small stones shifting—which is, incidentally, what the narrator feels in himself. “And Then My Dog Will Come Back To Me” is the longest piece in the collection, essentially serving as a standalone revenge fantasy. “Little Sister” returns to childhood and focuses on a four year old with his three year old sister and their misadventures, ending on a beautifully sad moment of the boy’s parents recounting a time he crassly embarrassed himself when he was two and everyone dying of laughter.
Of the lot, I think “Scenes from a Childhood” is my favourite. Fosse’s style is well-suited to the specificity of the vignettes. Fosse’s language is rarely complex; the bare simplicity of the language is touching, and the repetitiousness of his phrasing, the sentences that go on and on with commas and subordinate clauses, the return to key images and mantra-like phrases—all these are suited to encapsulate the experience of memory. I always love getting to hear about particular moments in someone else’s formative years; despite having a different upbringing Fosse’s semi-fictions are so resonant and connect me with memories of my own childhood that have long been buried. The scenes are often concise, pared down to the essential. “Hamburger,” for example, is a one-paragraph account of being hungry but having no money for food, “just enough for the bus ride home” (25). Atle “Is sitting at the same table, he is a few years older than me and they say he’s a terrible drinker” (25). He’s set up as a kind of Boo Radley figure and “He buys himself a hamburger” (25). The narrator continues, “I am so hungry. I don’t say anything. But then Atle asks if I’m in the mood for a hamburger and he goes and buys a hamburger for me too. I’m sure that Atle has barely any more money than I do, and still he buys me a hamburger. It tastes incredible” (25). The vignette ends there, and the story feels absolutely complete. It’s just a quiet moment where an outsider shares with another outsider, a simple gesture that is so mundane, but exactly the kind of thing people remember. In another vignette, Atle (the same Atle?) is at a community centre during a dance. The narrator steps out of the youth centre and sees that Atle has a full bag of beers. He waves a beer around, offering it to the narrator, and—isn’t life just like this?—”he turns somehow and drops the bottle and then falls head first down the stairs” (26). These odd and fateful spasms! The narrator runs over and Atle is “smiling up at [him] from the middle of a mess of blood and [he] sees that [Atle has] broken all his front teeth” (26). Again, the story ends there and it’s enough. The postcard tells us everything we need to connect and see why this scene would stand out.
One of the more extended scenes, though still only about a page and a half, is “My Grandmother is Lying in Bed.” It’s a moving account of the narrator’s grandmother passing away. As if by fate, the grandmother has been sent to hospital and the narrator is going to school in the same city. They’re both away from home but bound together. In the hospital, “There’s another bed along the other wall and someone’s lying there talking nonsense all the time” (19). The details of the interaction are so briefly described: “My grandmother smiles a t me. I smile back at her. I ask her how it’s going and she shakes her head from side to side” (19). The two then have a brief conversation where the narrator essentially trains his grandmother to respond to questions: “Do you want to come back home? I say. / I see her mouth trying to move. / Yes? I say. / My grandmother looks at me. I say yes again, slowly, clearly moving my lips. My grandmother looks at my lips. She shapes her own lips, copying mine. / Yes, she says” (19). Following this moment, a new section of the vignette starts. In part two, Fosse accounts for similarities and differences in the two experiences. He brings her bananas. Again, the narrator instructs her speech: “Everything all right? I say” [notice how the questions are framed as declarative statements instead of questions] “My grandmother doesn’t answer. / No, I say. / My grandmother looks at my lips, I say no again, slowly moving my mouth clearly” (19-20). The repetition illustrates their ongoing dynamic, but this time the grandmother can only make “some strange sounds” (20). In the face of her suffering, the narrator relates that “things are going well at school. [...] I tell her about where I’m living” (20). It’s the kind of futile storytelling that I think fills the silence when we can’t confront suffering directly and then they manage to find connection: “I tell her about someone I don’t like and my grandmother shakes her head and he eyes smile and we agree completely” (20). The final section of the vignette points to a disconnect when she’s actually passing; she’s scared and the narrator says, “I think she’s scared because she’s about to die and because she’s Christian. I see my grandmother writhe from side to side to her white nightgown. I’m not Christian. I put the bag of oranges I’ve brought down on the bedside table” (20). I can’t quite articulate why I find it so powerful, if perhaps not for the repetition of the phrases and the recycling (with a difference) of previous parts of the story.
I don’t know if there’s a specific word for repetition-with-a-difference as a literary device. I find it powerful, whatever it may be. In “Its Maybe Four O’Clock,” there’s a great deal of imagery and embedded in the middle of it are two phrases that describe an old barn: “A rusty hook is hanging from the door-frame. The door is hanging from the door-frame too” (10). I love constructions like that where you could just say both things are hanging from the door-frame but each are given their own separate, unique, but conceptually linked existence. The whole of “It’s Maybe Four O’Clock” is just beautiful imagery. I offer it here in its entirety:
It’s maybe four o’clock when Trygve and I go out to the old barn. My grandfather built this barn but now it’s falling apart, the unpainted planks in the walls are rotting away, there are holes in the wall you can see through in some places and a couple of the roof tiles lying in the nettles, three more sticking out of a puddle of mud. A rusty hook is hanging from the door-frame. The door is hanging from the door-frame too, attached with hay-baling cord, swinging crookedly. A warm summer day, afternoon. Trugve and I sit on a large round stone a few yards from the barn. There are plastic bags under our legs with our lunches inside, slices of bread with brown cheese, we each have a soft drink. It’s hot. We’re both sweating. Mosquitoes are buzzing round our heads. (10)
I find Fosse has such a beautiful knack for description that he requires neither many nor fancy words to create a complete picture. Just lovely.
Perhaps my favourite imagery in the book as a whole comes from the story “How It Started.” The story revolves around teens who meet at a community centre and go gallivanting together before walking one another home. There’s a scene in which they are huddled under a bus shelter as rain pours down and they play a kissing game. In just a few words, Fosse creates a vivid image: “The rain picks up, the wind gets stronger and the waves beating on the shore sound clearer. The evening gets darker. We dare to get closer to each other” (68). The passage then continues with a Beckettian description of systems (think: the pebble-sorting scenes in Malloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable). The narrator explains, “We say Kiss, and once the ones who said it were assigned to the ones who were to receive the kiss, who, according to the random chance of the game, were going to be kissed, when those going to kiss step out of the darkness towards those who are going to be kissed, no one looks, we all look down” (68). Even these convoluted and unnecessary explanations add to the tone of the piece. We then return to the imagery: “There is only darkness and rain around the pair, we others have disappeared, each into our own mute solitude even though there is a silent companionship surrounding the solitude, yes, a companionship, where no one says anything but we are with each other, not that we’re people for each other, but we’re there, and then it was her turn and I catch a sight of her eyes in the darkness” (68-69). Fosse is a master of describing darkness and light. The idea of these characters illuminated despite the darkness and rain and other obstructions around them is beautiful to me. The story then continues with a description of their first kiss and the sentence goes on for quite some time, but what I appreciate is how the physical qualities of the characters are mirrored. Embedded within the other description of the event, the narrator comments, “with my hair, with my body [...] I stand there, not feeling the rain” (69). Several clauses later, he stands there in his “wet jacket, [his] hands hanging straight down” and she comes out of the darkness “with her eyes, with her hair” (69). The parallel construction of the miniscule parts of them that emerge is like little illuminations in the gloom and then they “stand there, jacket to jacket” and feels “the warmth from her lips, her mouth, and wetness, / a warm wetness, nothing more, but so unlike anything else, so separate, a single short second and everything’s different, there in the bus shelter, the darkness, the rain” (69). A master of the form. The choice adjectives and the use of commas to pace the passage are just stunning.
Meanwhile, “And Then My Dog Will Come Back To Me” reflects an uncharacteristically vindictive character—I’m not saying it isn’t justified: a neighbour shoots and kills his dog. He then goes on a quest for revenge, repeating to himself how much he hates the man and how he’s going to kill him, before literally doing so. The repetitive phrases of Fosse’s writing usually feel spiritual to me and inspire a tenderness for his characters; their repeated phrases are like a periapt. Seeing repetitive phrases that are here rage-fueled feels more obsessive, compulsive, scary. There’s a tension in “And Then My Dog Will Come Back To Me” that shows the diversity of emotion Fosse is able to create. The story is a slow tension, where repetition prolongs the experience and uncertainty. Will the man follow through on his mission? Seeing the first-hand account of this distressed man also breeds sympathy as you see his thoughts become more muddled and disjointed, expecting that his dog will return to him at any moment—a dog whose head was blown away and whom he has already buried. It’s a powerful piece.
Returning to “Scenes from a Childhood,” there’s a section called “Asle Has Never Read a Book.” It goes as follows: “Asle has never read a book. And then they read a novel for school. Asle discovers he really likes it, because everything that in life only moves back and forth is like music somehow in the novel, so he really likes it, but it’s not exactly the same as music, because he knows what music is but this is a kind of music where everything that goes back and forth stays quiet and nice to think about” (42). Scenes from a Childhood, indeed all of Fosse’s work, has that musical quality. I adore the way he’s able to string the audience along with such musicality, and evoke the same emotion as do the swells of powerful music.
That makes it all the stranger when he offers the strangely imperative comment in “I Always Agree With Those Who Disagree”: “I understand that some of what matters most is missing from our lives. So there needs to be a revolution” (49). I feel like Fosse has the power to bestow that which is missing from our lives, and if, as Adrienne Rich says in her poem “Dreamwood” that “poetry / isn’t revolution but a way of knowing”, Fosse also seems to offer a new approach, a new way of knowing and a new way of being through his writing. However prosaic, Fosse’s writing is poetry. I am elevated by it every time I read his work.
Happy reading and happy New Year!
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