Bradley Johnson Productions Posts

Jon Fosse’s The Other Place describes two consecutive days in the life of its narrator Asle, a painter and widower who lives alone in a remote house in Dylgja. Another identical Asle, also a painter, lives in the nearby town of Bjørgvin. Fosse’s book moves quietly between these two men, two versions of the same person, on different paths.

Published with Fitzcarraldo, The Other Place, is the first book in Fosse’s Septology – an extended work exploring the nature of art, addiction and the passing of time. Translated by Damion Searls, the novel has been longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. Granta spoke to the author about painting, form and light.

What is it like to return to a completed book for the occasion of its translation? Do you find that your feelings for the book have evolved since it was first completed?

It is not a new experience for me to be translated. My plays are translated into over fifty languages, I don’t know how many my novels are translated into, but it is already decided that The Other Name, the first book of Septology, is, or will be, translated into fourteen languages, and there is interest from more countries. I am happy for this, of course, and also because The Other Name has been so well received in the countries where it has been published. It was published about the same time in Norwegian, English and German, to great reviews. It is no doubt the book I have published that has received the best reviews.

When my plays started to be translated, I tried to read the translations in the languages I could read, roughly speaking the other Scandinavian languages, German and English. But it took a lot of time, too much, so I decided to stop doing it. You have to trust others, both directors, actors and translators! Still my fantastic English translator Damion Searls and I decided to co-operate on the translation of The Other Name, so I answered quite a few questions, and we spoke about various possible translations etc. It was the first time had ever I worked that closely with a translator.

I try not to care too much about how a book will be received. What is important is that I have managed to write as well and as true as I possibly can, and that the book is published. I very rarely read reviews, but others read them for me. When I was a young writer I was very concerned about the reviews, and I always remembered the bad things written about a book – I still do – and soon forgot the good things. So after some years I found it best not, in principle, to read reviews.

The book features two men called Asle, one who lives in the country and one who lives in town. They are identical in many ways, but in others, they are different. Tell me about how this structure came about.

I prefer not to plan anything before I start writing, or only very few things: This time I decided that I wanted to write what I thought of as ‘slow prose’, this in contrast to the concentrated intensity needed in a play. I wanted to let the language move slowly away, like long waves. I wanted to calm down in the writing process, if I can put it like that. I wanted to write a novella, or a novel. And I wanted the main character to be a painter. I have always been fascinated by oil on canvas, and I have also painted myself in periods of my life.

Then, as always, I just sat down and started to write. I wrote the beginning during a summer stay in the castle of Paul Claudel in France, I was invited to stay there by his family, so the first Asle appeared there. And then I just kept on writing. Then the other Asle occurred. It just happened. Art happens, as Martin Heidegger writes.

To me writing is a kind of listening. I don’t know what I am listening to, but I am listening! And then the writing more or less writes itself. I often, at a certain point, get the feeling that what I am writing is already written, and that I just have to write it down before it disappears. Or sometimes it feels like I have to find the text that is already there.

To write what I myself have experienced doesn’t interest me at all. I write more to get rid of myself than to express myself. It is the creation of a new universe, characters, moods, a story, a specific way of writing, which is interesting to me. And if I manage to write well, I bring something to this world that wasn’t there before. And that is also completely new to me.

On the other side, I of course know something about what I am writing about, but my experiences are transformed through the writing. I guess this transformation, as you could call it, might partly explain why my writing travels as well as it does.

The narrator of this book is a painter. You immerse your readers in the technical aspects of the craft. How did you learn about these things?

I have painted myself. And I have close friends who are painters.

Were there particular paintings, or schools of painting that served as touchstones in the writing of this book?

No. But my Japanese translator once wrote to me that my writing reminded her of the paintings of Mark Rothko. And I can understand what she means. There is such a strong silent voice speaking from his paintings, and I hope there is also a kind of silent voice speaking from my writing.

You have described Septology (in an interview with Cecilie Seiness in Syn og Segn) as ‘possibly just an instant, a loaded one, a moment of death’. This phrase may have shifted in translation from Norwegian into English, but could you talk more about this idea of a loaded moment? 

Septology is a long novel. I have never ever written anything that comes close to the length of this novel before. I didn’t plan it to be that long, but I just wrote on, in the movement of the writing, and in the end I had written over fifteen hundred pages. If I had any idea of how long I planned to write, I would say perhaps one hundred and fifty pages. The novel more or less wrote itself. It demanded its length itself. And in writing it, I felt more and more that it was very important for me to manage to fulfil it, to manage to write it to its end. And I was really happy when I had managed.

When I now think about what I have written, I can tell that there are many elements from my plays and other novels in Septology, but they are organized in a new way, and are seen in a new light, in a way they go together as a kind of simultaneity, as one loaded moment, perhaps. I have heard it said that some people before they die, or in the moment of death, can see their whole life pass by. No one can know if it is like this, but perhaps. I feel very unpleasant interpreting my own writing, but when it was first said, I could understand that Septology could be seen as such a moment. Or the novel can be read in this perspective. But this is of course just one way of interpreting it.

Early in the book, the narrator describes ‘a soft invisible light’ coming from his painting. The idea recurs through the novel. What does such a light propose?

I don’t know. But I also want a kind of light to come from my writing. A kind of reconciliation in all the pain, all the sorrow. And I think such a light is possible. The light you need is there somewhere.

You have been publishing work now for thirty-seven years. No doubt you and others have identified enduring themes in your work. Are there particular examples that you return to in this work? Has your attitude towards them changed?

I started out writing at twelve, I wrote poems and short stories. And in many ways, I am still this twelve-year-old boy sitting and writing. Back then, I already felt that writing gave me a kind of shelter. I liked to stay in the space, or in the place, of writing. I wrote my first published novel at twenty, and it was published three years later, so I have actually now been writing for publication for forty years. And writing becomes more and more interesting the longer I write. Perhaps because there are no rules for it. It is different all the time. Each new text is a different challenge, a different experience.

There are motifs that come to me over and over again, but still they are always different. It perhaps resembles the work of a painter who is painting the same motifs again and again, but is changing them all the time also. One of these motifs is a person standing or sitting before a window looking out, very often on the sea. This situation is a recurring motif in Septology.

I never actually feel that I’m writing about this or that theme, what I am writing about is part of what I very imprecisely can call form. And this unity of form and content, or theme, is saying something very specific that cannot be said in another way than in the way it is written. Still it is as if it’s not ‘about’ something, it is what it is, in a way.

You have won many awards over the years. What is your attitude towards awards?

It took quite a few years before I had my first big award, and it was a really great moment when I had the phone call telling me that I would get it. It was one of the most important literary prizes in Norway. By now I have received many awards, yes, but I am very happy for each of them. It is as if they prove that I haven’t spent all my life in vain, at least I have written something that might be good for others, or for some others, or so is my hope, at least.

Image © Tom Kolstad / Samlaget

The post Interview appeared first on Granta.

Welcome to Read Like a Writer, a new series that examines a different element of the craft of fiction writing in each installment, using examples from the Recommended Reading archives. Each month, the editors of Recommended Reading—Halimah Marcus, Brandon Taylor, and Erin Bartnett—will select a few stories that illustrate a specific technique, style, or writing challenge. 

In the first installment of Read Like A Writer, we discussed how to write an ending that is surprising yet inevitable. In this installment, we’re going to talk about another way to build momentum in narrative by thinking about how that “surprise” element can be turned into suspense. Alfred Hitchcock illustrated the difference between surprise and suspense by inviting you to imagine a bomb under the table. If neither the characters nor the audience knows about the bomb, and it goes off, that’s a surprise. If the audience knows about the bomb, but the characters do not, and the audience anticipates the bomb going off, that is the suspense. The key difference is dramatic irony, that old dusty literary concept we all learned in high school. 

But dramatic irony has much subtler applications than high school curriculum allows. Alice Munro opened my mind to the potential of dramatic irony and it’s painful pleasures with her story “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage.” In it, a woman named Johanna goes to work for a man and his teenage granddaughter, Sabitha. Johanna is an object of mockery for the Sabitha and her friend Edith because she lacks fashionable clothes and interests. Sabitha and Edith begin writing Johanna love letters that purport to be from the Sabitha’s’s father, and Johanna falls in love with the father through letters he did not write. Eventually, she writes that she is coming to live with him, packs up, and leaves.

I experienced this short story like a horror movie, my dread mounting, my palms sweating. My compassion for Johanna grew proportionally to my certainty that she would be heartbroken and humiliated. But Munro, the master, would never do something so predictable and cheap. When Johanna goes to live with the father (spoilers here), they fall in love and live happily ever after. 

Even when a story isn’t dealing with bombs, dramatic irony is often something that is set and later deployed. The dramatic irony in “Hateship, Friendship” is that I, the reader, know something Johanna does not, which is the true author of the love letters. Munro uses that knowledge to heighten the emotion of my reading experience, and then deploys it in a self-aware way that undermines my expectations. 

We can’t all be as good as Munro, but we can borrow a few tricks. Here are three stories from the Recommended Reading archives that deploy dramatic irony in complex and unexpected ways of their own. – HM

“A Beautiful Wife is Suddenly Dead” by Margaret Meehan

In Margaret Meehan’s “A Beautiful Wife Is Suddenly Dead,” Karen Roberts wants a made-for-TV life. A high school English teacher who cliff-noted her way through her own education, Karen prefers to imagine herself as a character in another story—a teacher whose “students might erupt into applause, hearts bursting, changed forever” à la Dead Poets Society. After school hours, she fantasizes about the countless, brutally murdered women in her favorite true crime shows, now suddenly beautiful and talented in the past tense. She opts for hair extensions, long red nails, and smooth, waxed skin. She has a husband and she tolerates him, but mostly she’s annoyed he’s not willing to play a more interesting role than “doting husband.” Karen is what some might call “basic,” and what others might call “unlikeable.”  

But from the very first line of the story, we know that Karen’s story is going to get less basic: “Karen Roberts is going to fall out the window.” It’s quintessential dramatic irony—we know Karen is going to fall, she doesn’t. In her introduction to the story, Halimah Marcus calls the opening line of the story a dare. It’s fun to think about dramatic irony as a dare. Like dares, which are performed for the cringing pleasure of others, dramatic irony often relies on a sense of dread. We know something terrible is going to happen, but the character is blissfully ignorant in a way that allows them to continue living out their lives. There’s a measure of schadenfreude fueling our progress from paragraph to paragraph. 

In “A Beautiful Wife,” the feeling powering our experience of the story may start off as dread, but as we get to know Karen, and her obsession with true crime shows, their “miraculous recasting of mediocrity in death,” our dread lifts into something more like delight. Who is Karen, this unapologetically vain woman who is kind of okay with being a beautiful dead one? Meehan subtly guides our attention by creating an unflinching portrait of an unlikeable woman who dreams of living at the center of a more dramatic life. We’re consuming her like she consumes true crime. But she’s not like those other true crime girls. The story dares you to care about Karen, to care about whether or not she gets what she wants. – EB

“PU-239” by Ken Kalfus

“Pu-239” by Ken Kalfus is about a disgruntled employee at a Russian nuclear power plant, who, after an accident, steals weapon-grade plutonium to sell on the black market. Timofey’s health has been compromised by the accident, which exposed him to radiation. He knows he will likely die prematurely, and he has nothing to leave his family. The money he makes from the sale will be his life insurance. 

Fiona Maazel introduced the story when we published it in 2013. “It would undersell the story to suggest it’s just a satire,” she wrote. “No, this fiction has the higher aim of ennobling stupidity — of recognizing its power and aptitude for destruction.” The stupidity she’s referring to here is, at least to start, Timofey walking around Moscow with plutonium stored in a coffee can, strapped to his chest. 

It’s not that knowing that Timofey will die that creates the dramatic irony—he knows that too, on some level. Even a person with the most cursory knowledge of nuclear physics knows how catastrophically idiotic Timofey’s behavior is. This tension between the reader’s commonsense knowledge and the character’s reckless actions—the tension encapsulated in Maazel’s phrase “ennobling stupidity”—is where the true dramatic irony lies. Knowing what’s going to happen won’t drive a story; dreading it does. – HM

“Alta’s Place” by Morgan Thomas

“Alta’s Place” charts Cory’s growing fascination with Alta, an enigmatic woman who appears one evening at the dry cleaner where Cory works with a coffee stain on her suit. Through their conversation, retold by Cory, we come to understand how Alta’s suit was stained during an asylum interview, and the circumstances under which Alta left her native Mongolia for Virginia. Her landlord discovered her living with another woman with whom she was in a romantic relationship and evicted her, an initial cruelty that had the ripple effect of forcing her to leave the country entirely.

In a subtle and masterful deployment of first-person point of view, the reader sees Alta as a kind of doubled. That is, we see Alta through her own words in scene and quoted dialogue, but we also see the narrator’s warped version of Alta. Morgan Thomas deftly reveals the ways Cory’s perception of Alta is curtailed by her own limited experience and by a tendency to objectify and exoticize. 

The dramatic irony that brings this story to its masterful and subtle conclusion stems from the gap between who Cory understands Alta to be and who Alta actually is. As a queer woman herself, Cory is alert to the realities of queer life in America, but she is at times inattentive to Alta’s reality and subtly invalidating of her experiences, eldiding them, wanting to make them smaller, more manageable than they are. Again and again, Cory references wanting to draw Alta. To touch her clothing. To eat her food. To become her, in a way. But Cory doesn’t question these impulses. She is unaware of this tendency in herself, but it is carefully wrought and visible for the reader, giving rise to a tension as we wait for it all to become clear to her. – BT

The post How To Use Dramatic Irony for More Than Shenanigans appeared first on Electric Literature.