Trilogy
by Jon Fosse
Published 2014 147 pagesA trio of novellas following a man and woman called Asle and Alida as they try to find a corner of the world to live in. The book is rich in allusions but doesn't club you over the head with it; though I've never been to Norway, the writing feels typically Scandinavian to me: spare, naturalistic, levelheaded, a little bit poetic.
Fosse's formal approach leans heavily on long run-on sentences and minimal dialogue, giving a sort of rambling vocal style to the text. It didn't resonate with me at first but I got into it after a little while. I'm not sure how much I'd enjoy reading more than a couple hundred pages of it, however: page after page of run-on sentence obliterated any sense of pacing for me. Not a problem here, but if I were sitting down to, say, seven full-length novels of this I might give up.
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Pulling some gross old spark plugs, probably the originals, out of Sam's Porsche 924, and fitting some shiny new ones.
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Participating in the time-honoured tradition of hurtling oneself down a hillside in the name of an 18th-century explorer.