Sometimes death is the most worn-out cliché imaginable.
The ultimate destination of the personal human journey hovers over the existence of man, and serves as a distant point of reference, one that allows for a contemplative, melancholy, deep to black gaze, or one that delves deep.
Existentialist literature in the 20th century established the practice of the subject as indisputable, seeking to establish a life full of meaning and freedom in the face of the knowledge that man ends his life with a weak response.
Ion Fossa is considered one of the greatest Norwegian writers, and his writing is often described as existentialist, existential writing.
"Morning and Evening" was published in 2000, and is the first Hebrew translation of a text that is not a play by the Norwegian author.
At the center of the story - the life and death of a fisherman named Johannes.
In the first part Johannes was born, and in the second part Johannes is already an older man, his wife has long since passed away and he goes on fishing trips with his friend Peter.
They spend the hours together, calculating fish calculations and payment, talking about the haircuts they told each other over the years and the money they saved, and looking for more people to spend their time with.
Born, live, pass the time and die.
It is existentialist literature not only because of the themes that rhyme with it, but also because of the everyday description that penetrates every particle of a moment, describing existence as its being - moment after moment, shoe lock after shoe lock, coffee making after coffee making.
The duration of the characters' existence is at full resolution, 100 percent existence.
Posa writes without dots at the end of sentences, perhaps to continue to echo the sentences the characters utter even after being thrown into the air.
At first this choice is puzzling, as a kind of attempt to be experimental by force, but very quickly one gets used to this position of words and the effect it produces.
It was possible, of course, to get along even without this choice, but it does not detract from the text, and in some cases even contributes to it.
When Posa describes the gray everyday existence, it sometimes seems like a faint imitation of Samuel Beckett's absurd dialogues, the same Beckett who described life in the sentence: "They give birth with a split on a grave, daylight flashes for a moment, then night again."
It's Fosa's morning and evening, life that flashes for a moment like morning and ends instantly on a dark evening, but Fusa's characters do not have the brilliance and charm of Beckett's familiar characters.
Johannes and his friend Peter go fishing, waiting for Mrs. Petersen to come and buy the crabs they fished.
"Will she come?", Johannes asks anxiously every few moments, and Peter immediately reassures him: "She will come, she will come."
Fosa is not content with the routine course of depicting birth, life and death, and adds to the story a plot twist in the style of the film "The Sixth Sense", which is literary successful but not enough to knock the reader off his feet.
The fluid transition from the realm of the living to the realm of the dead is done quite elegantly, and the blurring is well conveyed throughout the book, but this does not really justify the greyish life that takes place in between.
And really, the most beautiful moments in the book take place at the endpoints of the story - in birth and death.
Johannes' birth description was also given moment by moment, with a zoom in on all the details and a stormy pace of writing.
The consciousness described at this point is that of Olei, Johannes' father, watching his wife writhing in pain in her knees to give birth, and he is engrossed in thoughts of God and Satan and the purpose of life, and the description of the moment of birth is full of life and colors: Slowly, now you press a little more, well done Martha and Anna the old midwife says a little more and presses him in the head and the darkness is no longer red and soft and all the sounds and the constant pounding o o da do da o o o o da ... and he is no longer there but he roars and then a sound And something like throws it of itself into something and then hands and fingers bend at the fingers and all the old men and everything is no longer in an old house of water in an ancient sea of green and shining stars moving away and approaching and they come and nothing is clear but through all the clarity Then this silence is a great and ancient silence. "
Fossa excels at describing these dramatic moments, and shows that his writing culminates when events are critical.
Once the gray day takes the stage, so does the writing.
So in the last part of the book, when the reader is exposed to Johannes' death, to move from one world to another, Fosa manages to capture delicate moments of existence, and the protagonist's relationship with his friend Peter is painted a new color - "Peter and he are themselves Different, everything is one and yet it is exactly what it is, everything is separate and inseparable and everything is peaceful and Johannes walks around and far down there ... ".
The book would have risen if Fossa had chosen to equip its protagonists with a more interesting life than the lives of retired fishermen who pass their time at random.
"Drama" and "suspense" are not vulgar words, even in contemplative existential literature.
Ion Fosa / Morning and Evening, Norwegian: Dana Caspi, United Kibbutz, 114 pages
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