He is not a dour writer, however. “Many people have stressed the sublimity of Fosse’s writing—a sublimity verging on divinity—but few have pointed out how funny he can be as a novelist and a playwright,” the critic Merve Emre, who wrote about Fosse for The New Yorker last year, said in an email. “In Septology, there is the longing for grace, for deliverance, yes, but also for “a simple open-faced ground-beef sandwich with onions” (in Damion’s great translation). The basic urges of peoples’ bodies—hunger, desire, illness, death—bring them down to earth and that’s where they must remain— where they must wait, in the company of others, for a redemption that may or may not come.” (Shortly after the Prize was announced, Emre highlighted another overlooked aspect of its significance: “Jon Fosse: a win, once again, for literary hotties,” she wrote in a DM.)
Fosse’s language is itself notable: He writes in nynorsk, the smaller of Norway’s two official languages, that he has also translated a number of writers into, notably Franz Kafka and James Joyce. Fosse is a “national hero among nynorsk speakers,” his translator, Damion Searls, told The New Republic shortly after the announcement was made. Fosse is also the first Scandinavian to win the Prize since Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer was awarded in 2011 for his poems about jetties, piers, and other things that protrude into water. “It’s natural for people outside Northern Europe to think, ‘oh great, another Scandi winner,’” Tulinius said. “That’s fair, as seventeen laureates have been Nordic, with a majority of those being Swedish.” Though since Laxness won in 1955, Fosse is the first Nordic author from outside Sweden to win. But is it ridiculous that even if you just count the Nordic authors not from Sweden, that’s the same number of laureates as the continent of Africa has? Yes. Yes it is.”
Fosse represents “the power of literature to do something that nothing else can do,” Searls, who has arguably done more than anyone else to bring his work into English, said. “You really feel a certain way and you feel a certain connection to the people you’re reading about when you’re reading his books that is unique and special. It’s not telling us the news. It’s more like painting a picture but it works differently than painting. It gives you this communion with other people and the bigger forces in the world that you’ve never gotten anywhere else. It feels very moving. It’s pure literature.”