NY Times: The Rarest Of Nobel Laureates In Literature — A Man Of Faith

Following up on last Sunday's post, New York Times: The Mystical Catholic Tradition of Jon Fosse:  New York Times, Jon Fosse Wants to Say the Unsayable:

The prolific Norwegian is the rarest of recent literary prize winners: an author and playwright in thrall to the divine.

When the Nobel Prize-winning author Jon Fosse was 7 years old, he had an accident that would shape his writing life. ...

Fosse said that [his] childhood brush with death had influenced all his literary work: fiction, plays and poetry, for which he will receive the Nobel Prize in Literature in a ceremony on Sunday.

The perspective he gained in the moment of his accident, Fosse explained, made its way into his writing: “I often say that there are two languages: The words that I wrote, the words you can understand, and behind that, there’s a silent language.” And it’s in that “silent language,” he added, that the real meaning may lie.

In a lecture in Stockholm on Thursday, a ritual that all Nobel laureates observe before getting their awards, Fosse expanded a little on the idea of a silent language. “It is only in the silence that you can hear God’s voice,” he said. “Maybe.”

To Fosse’s fans the spiritual and existential dimensions are a major part of the appeal. Anders Olsson, the chair of the Nobel committee that awarded Fosse the prize, said that Fosse’s work induced feelings and questions in readers “that ultimately exist beyond language.” The “deep sense of the inexpressible” in Fosse’s plays and novels leads readers “ever deeper into the experience of the divine,” Olsson said.

Last month’s announcement that Fosse had won might have surprised some American readers. Fosse (pronounced FOSS-eh) only recently came to prominence in the English-speaking world with books that include “Septology,” a seven-part opus told in part as a stream of consciousness from the mind of an aging painter. ...

At the time he was writing [his] early books, during his 20s, Fosse was an atheist and surrounded by people who were equally irreligious. He taught at a writing academy in the city of Bergen, in Norway, where his circle included “intellectuals, students and young artists” who were committed communists and thought that art and literature should be political. (Karl Ove Knausgaard was one of his students.)

But Fosse didn’t agree. “Literature ought to be engaged in itself,” he said, rather than trying to achieve a political, social or even religious goal.

As he wrote more, Fosse said, the process itself led him to begin to question his atheism. He never planned a story or a poem in advance — but when the words just tumbled out, he started to wonder where it all came from. He began exploring religion, including attending Quaker meetings, and “a kind of reconciliation, or peace,” came into his writing, he said. ...

• Catholic Review, Norway Catholics Welcome Nobel Prize For Writer-Convert
• CNE News, Nobel Prize Author Says Faith in God Inspires His Writing
• Public Discourse, Jon Fosse’s Septology and Faith in Fiction
• The Tablet, Nobel Literature Prize Winner Is Hailed as ‘Very Much a Catholic Writer’

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