Jo Nesbø / ‘Tom Sawyer was my first murder mystery’

 

Jo Nesbø

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Jo Nesbø: ‘Tom Sawyer was my first murder mystery’

This article is more than 2 years old

The Norwegian crime writer talks about his early influences, changing tastes and the age-limit for enjoying Hemingway

Jo Nesbø

Fri 22 Sep 2023 10.00 BST

My favourite book growing up
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. My father grew up in New York; I guess that’s why there were a lot of American books in our house. These two by Mark Twain were food for the imagination for a kid like me. The Huck book was my first road novel, Tom Sawyer my first murder mystery.

The book that changed me as a teenager
The Thief’s Journal, Jean Genet’s classic novel about life and exploitation as a gay man living on the margins in 1930s Europe, changed my view on what literature can and should deal with. At that age, I found it tough reading because the mental landscape of the main character was repellent to me. Not his sexual orientation, but because he found some kind of pleasure in being treated badly. I couldn’t grasp that. And that was probably what drew me to the novel.

The book that made me want to be a writer 
Both On the Road by Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski’s Ham on Rye were important. I do think writing is a result of reading, like making music is a result of listening to music. That it’s mainly a social reflex, like stories being told around a dinner table; somebody has contributed a story, now it’s your turn.

The book I could never read again
I was a big fan of Ernest Hemingway. Recently I started rereading (which I very seldom do) a novel of his, and realised it felt dated. I don’t know if it’s because Hemingway, like Raymond Chandler, has influenced so many writers that they now can come across as almost comic copies. When I mentioned my disappointment, my 25-years-younger editor said, with a world-weary sigh: “But, you know, Hemingway is a young man’s writer.”

The book I discovered later in life
Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March. I was recently going through the books I’ve inherited from my parents. It follows three generations of a family, with the breakdown of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy as a backdrop, and it’s a gem of a novel. It has this sense of time and place that I know is impossible to construct – it has to already be there within the writer. It’s sad, it’s epic and it has a tragic gravity to it that brings a lump to my throat: the fact that you can’t go back, that the past – not the future – is the promised garden.

The author I came back to 
Well, Henrik Ibsen was mandatory reading when you went to school in Norway, and at that young age he felt old and boring. It was only later, when I was living a life where I could relate, that I started reading him. I went on to read all of his plays, every one of them, and realised what a great entertainer he is.

The book I am currently reading

The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. Haidt has a background in social anthropology and psychology and it’s a convincing argument on how morality has evolved and on how it divides us in politics and social behaviour, enlightening when it comes to understanding why some Americans vote Republican in spite of being decent, intelligent human beings. Like David Hume said, reason is the slave of emotions. We use our intellect to find confirmation that what we feel and want to be true is actually the truth. Confirmation bias may carry us from our childhood to our grave, without ever feeling we were proved wrong. That goes for “them” and for me and you, Guardian readers.

THE GUARDIAN

THE BOOKS OF MY LIFE

2021
The books of my life / Amanda Gorman / ‘I wanted my words to re-sanctify the steps of the Capitol’Mary Beard / ‘Virgil was a radical rap artist of the first century BC’

Gabriel Byrne: ‘I’ve never played Hamlet, but in many ways I am him’Stephen King: ‘I loved Lord of the Flies the way kids love Harry Potter’

Curtis Sittenfeld / ‘Sweet Valley High is not respected – but I found the books riveting’
Elif Shafak / ‘Reading Orlando was like plunging into a cold but beautifully blue sea’
Jason Reynolds / “Reading rap lyrics made me realise that poetry could be for me”
Michael Rosen / ‘My comfort read? Great Expectations’
Siri Hustvedt / ‘I responded viscerally to De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex’
Alan Garner / ‘The Chronicles of Narnia are atrociously written’
Rose Tremain / ‘My comfort reads are MasterChef cookbooks’
Oliver Jeffers / ‘Catch-22 was the first time I had a physical reaction to a book’
Penelope Lively / ‘Beatrix Potter seemed so exotic, unlike my world of palm trees’


2022
David Baddiel / The book that changed me? John Berger’s Ways of Seeing
Edmund White / ‘My earliest reading memory is a lady toad with a nasty temper’
David Mitchell / ‘If I need cheering up, Jamie Oliver’s recipes usually help’
Isabel Allende / ‘I have been displaced most of my life’

Nikesh Shula / 

Olivia Laing / 

Viet Thanh Nguyen / 

Madeline Miller /

Barbara Trapido / 

Monica Ali / 

Sebastian Barry / 

Hanif Kureishi / 

Neil Gaiman / 

Lee Child / 

PAGE 7

Meg Mason / 

Esther Freud / 

Maggie Shipstead / 

Ian Rankin / 

Julian Barnes / 

Sadie Jones / 

Tahmima Anam / 

Tess Gerritsen / 

Abdulrazah Gurnak / 

Susie Boyt / 

Sara Paretsky / 

Sebastian Faulks / 

Karen Joy Fowler / 

Eimear McBride / 

Sam Byers / 

Denise Mina / 

Adam Kay / 

Barbara Kingsolver / ‘Middlemarch is about everything, for every person, at every age’

Kit de Waal / 

Sunjeev Sahota / 

PAGE 6

Shehan Karunatilaka / 

Michael Morpurgo / 

Michelle Zauner / 

Amy Blum / 

Philip Pullman / 

2023

Alex Wheatle /

Colin Thubron / 

Audrey Maggee / 

Joseph O'Connor /

Ned Beauman / 

Kevin Jared Hosein / 

Carlo Roveli / 

Benjamin Myers / 

Charlotte Mendelson /

Warsan Shire / 

Katherine Rundel / 

Louise Kennedy / 

Colson Whitehead / 

Han Kang / 

Dreda Say Mitchell / 

PAGE 5

Jessie Burton / 

Kamila Shamsie / 

Jenny Erpenbeck / 

Gary Shteyngart

Attica Locke /

Richard Ford / ‘I don’t read for comfort. Comfort I source elsewhere’

Elly Griffiths /

Juno Dawson / 

DBC Pierre / 

Patrick DeWitt / 

Lisa Jewell / 

Ayòbámi Adébàyó /

Bret Easton Ellis: ‘I connected with Quentin Tarantino’

Lynda La Plante / 

Preti Taneja / 

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie / 

Jo Nesbø / ‘Tom Sawyer was my first murder mystery’

Lauren Groff / ‘Virginia Woolf’s Flush is delightfully bananas’

Paul Lynch / 

John Niven / 

PAGE 4

Natalie Haynes / ‘I couldn’t stop reading Stephen King - even at the top of the Eiffel Tower’
Richard Armitage / ‘I used to stand on the Lord of the Rings to reach the top shelf in my wardrobe’

Dolly Alderton / 

Jonathan Escoffery / 

Joanne Harris / 

Hernan Diaz / 

Irenosen Okojie / 

Bob Mortimer / 

Francis Spufford / 

2024

Mieko Kawakami / “Franz Kafka es mi lectura reconfortante”

2025
Niall Williams / ‘When I first read Chekhov, I thought: “He’s not so great”’
Graham Norton / ‘The Bell Jar changed how I felt about books’

 

Jon Fosse

A BOOK OF THE DAY

Review

A Shining by Jon Fosse review – a spiritual journey

The new Nobel laureate’s latest novella is a shimmering fable about a man lost in a dark forest

Lauren Groff

Saturday 18 November 2023

O

ne day in late autumn, a man goes for a drive so far into the countryside that he begins to pass no more dwellings of the living, only abandoned farmhouses and cabins. At last, he pulls into a forest and goes down a road so deeply rutted that the car finally becomes stuck. Night is falling. It has begun to snow. The man decides to leave his car and walk alone into the dark woods to try to find someone to help him.

 

For Karl Ove Knausgård, it's all the small things

With his wildly popular autobiographical series My Struggle, the author breaks down the banal

Emily M. Keeler

October 24, 2014

Author’s name: Karl Ove Knausgard

Article contentKarl Ove Knausgard

Title: Boyhood Island: My Struggle, Book 3
Events at International Festival of Authors:In Conversation with Karl Ove Knausgård, Oct. 25, 7:30 p.m., Fleck Dance Theatre, 207 Queens Quay West ($18);
Roundtable: Boys to Men, Oct. 26, 12p.m., Fleck Dance Theatre, 207 Queens Quay West, Toronto ($18)

“It doesn’t feel like a memoir to me, partly because it doesn’t reveal enough stories from my life,” Karl Ove Knausgård says over the phone. Considering how it clocks in at close to 4,000 pages in total, it’s hard to imagine that Knausgård has left anything out of My Struggle, his profoundly autobiographical novel that spans six volumes. “It’s much more like the process of a novel,” he says, “much more like an existential search for something.” Five years after the first book of the series was published in Scandinavia, Knausgård’s search continues.

A Shining by Jon Fosse

 

A SHINING

by JON FOSSE

Translated from the Norwegian by Damion Searls

2023 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

In Fosse's first novel since his critically acclaimed Septology, a man starts driving without knowing where he is going. He alternates between turning right and left, and ultimately finds himself stuck at the end of a forest road. It soon grows dark and begins to snow. But instead of searching for help, he ventures, foolishly, into the dark forest. Inevitably the man gets lost, and as he grows cold and tired, he encounters a glowing being amid the obscurity. Strange, haunting and dreamlike, A Shining is the latest work of fiction by National Book Award-finalist Jon Fosse, “the Beckett of the twenty-first century” (Le Monde).

 

Jon Fosse

‘An extraordinary ethereal force’: readers react to the work of Jon Fosse

The author finally achieved global recognition with his Nobel prize in literature, but he has been winning fans with his mesmerising prose and elemental plays for years

Jem Bartholomew

Friday 6 October 2023

When Ben Willows, a 23-year-old actor in London, was working a shift at his day job in Waterstones last September, he read the blurb of Jon Fosse’s The Other Name.

It was so striking that Willows then spent his whole afternoon break – in the cramped staff room with uncomfortable chairs and glaring fluorescent lights – devouring it. “I was absolutely transported,” he says.

The book is the first in the Septology series by the Norwegian author who on Thursday was awarded the Nobel literature prize.

Ben Willows. Photograph: Ben Willows

“He manages to say these absolute truths and philosophies in really subtle ways,” Willows says, “and also captures thought. I think that’s what drew me in.

“I was like, yeah, that’s how I think: I careen from one thought to another, which flows into a memory, which cuts to something from years earlier that then brings me back to now.”

On receiving the Nobel award, Fosse said he was “overwhelmed, and somewhat frightened. I see this as an award to the literature that first and foremost aims to be literature, without other considerations.”

The Guardian spoke to readers about what they enjoy about Fosse’s work and how it has affected their lives.

‘He brings hope’ … Jon Fosse. Photograph: Hakon Mosvold Larsen

‘Reading his plays is like breathing in a new way’

Linda Zachrison, artistic director at Göteborgs Stadsteater, loves how Fosse is “a magician of writing what’s not said”.

Linda Zachrison. Photograph: Ola Kjelbye

“He has his own language,” Zachrison says. “When you read his plays, it’s like breathing in a new way.” In 1999, Zachrison helped bring a theatre production of Fosse’s to Stockholm’s Stadsteater.

Zachrison, 50, says plays like Someone Is Going to Come and The Name have taught her to see and approach the world in new ways. “I remember being very moved and touched, and feeling empathy for all the people that he portrayed – and also feeling empathy for the world around me … and how we’re all struggling.”

Zachrison is drawn to how Fosse’s work explores “how hard it can be just to communicate with each other,” and how language can become “an obstacle instead of a tool for understanding”.

“He’s very existential, in a way. He shows the fragility of being here,” Zachrison says, and the complexities of “how thin the line is between enjoyment or love; irritation or attraction; a wish to reach out or neglect. It’s a simpleness in his writing that opens up an extreme complexity.”

‘Even now, I get a slight shiver’

Fosse’s books in the UK are printed by London-based independent publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions, which has now won three of the past five Nobel literature prizes, with Annie Ernaux (2022) and Olga Tokarczuk (2018).

John Stout, a 69-year-old retired computer science teacher in Greater Manchester, discovered Fosse by chance after taking out a Fitzcarraldo subscription.

He received a copy of Aliss at the Fire, about a woman, Signe, in her old house by a fjord who sees a vision of herself 20 years ago – when her husband failed to return from the water on his rowboat.

“Even now,” Stout says, “I get a slight shiver” thinking about that night on the water and the “sense of impending doom”.

For Stout, it brought up memories of sailing with his father in Scotland as a boy; they sometimes sailed to the Isle of Man, and the children would have to stay quiet during the BBC shipping forecast. “She’s looking back and you get this feeling of these other generations who are there in the house, and are in her thoughts all the time.”

‘He has a deep empathy’

Camilla Bauer, a 51-year-old translator and writer in Stockholm, says that Fosse’s award is particularly poignant amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Camilla Bauer. Photograph: Camilla Bauer/Guardian Community

“He has a deep empathy, he can go down and really analyse where things went wrong – why people become bullies or violent – but there’s always a kind empathy,” Bauer says.

“In these days of war and cynical people killing each other, I think this was very timely. He tackles dark themes, but he shows us where things go wrong and brings hope.”

Bauer first encountered Fosse around 2010, when she went to a day dedicated to his work in Stockholm. She remembers the psychological immediacy of his dramas. As in his plays, “I have been in spaces” where people try to “take away your space, where everything you say is wrong,” leading you to withdraw into yourself – which Fosse captures so well.

‘He has an extraordinary ethereal force’

Alongside novels and poetry, Fosse has written more than 30 plays and is the most-performed Norwegian playwright since Henrik Ibsen.

Chris Lee. Photograph: Chris Lee/Guardian Community

Chris Lee, a 59-year-old Irish playwright in London, says he is “mesmerised” by Fosse’s work. His ability to mix theatricality and poetry makes his writing “a weird combination of Harold Pinter and Seamus Heaney in a Norwegian fjord”, Lee says. With his plays, there’s a “prayer-like effect” and an “ethereal force” that stays with you.

Lee says that, being a playwright himself, there are “many moments in your life when nothing’s happening, and you feel that maybe nothing will ever happen again”. But Fosse’s writing has been “a great source of confidence” and taught him that “ploughing your own furrow is the best thing to do”.

It’s brilliant for playwrights that Fosse was been awarded the Nobel, Lee adds, so it’s “a time for celebration”.

THE GUARDIAN