Aliss at the Fire is without a doubt the best thing that I have read this year. Fosse invites the reader to the world of Signe, an elderly widow who reflects on the disappearance of her husband Asle twenty years prior. It is as compelling a reflection on grief, time, and love as anything I have ever read.
Central to the novella’s triumph is Fosse’s trademark prose. One is reminded of Bach fugue, with voices entering the narrative not as an additional theme, but instead as an additional layer superimposed upon the whole. Even as one character speaks the murmur of other voices, of other times, are ever present. Heavy use of repetition yields a trance-like reading effect, enchanting and ensnaring the reader alike. Perspectives shift between characters and times at will, often mid sentence. All of this, we suppose, is projected from Signe’s memory as she grapples with her past.
The relationship between Signe and Asle is mute, with the only small glimpses we are offered coming from the hours prior to Asle’s disappearance in the fjord near their home. Their conversations are laboured and unbalanced, with Signe unable to pierce through her husband’s reticence. In an attempt to escape, from what we are never certain, Asle rows daily on the fjord, where in poor weather he eventually meets his death.
Other characters are introduced as the novella progresses, including Asle’s great-grandmother Aliss. These all follow tangential narrative threads, linking back to the main story via theme and location. Despite their position in the past, in his prose Fosse does not treat them as such; these characters occupy the same narrative time, which is outside of any real time, as Signe and Agnes. They are not merely hallucinations of the past and live and breathe in the same space as the present Signe.
It is these extra characters, all of whom are distant relatives of Asle, that yield Aliss at the Fire an almost religious bent. Their stories foreshadow and somehow explain the disappearance of Asle. His grandfather’s brother, also named Asle, too drowned in the fjord when he was a young boy. These additional stories not only produce a strong emotive force when treated in isolation, but also when paired with Signe’s grief. Eventually these narrative threads are all focused back to one, with Signe ending the novella reflecting on her own eventual death.
Aliss by the Fire can be read in an afternoon and produces a reading experience unlike anything I have encountered before. Prior to this I read Foss’s Melancholy I & II which while similar in prose style, was ultimately much less compelling a book to me. With only one point of view, the repetition quickly became tedious, and strayed too much on the side of madness. The next work I plan on reading by Fosse is his recent Septology, which by many is considered to be his finest.