The latest addition to my website is Jon Fosse‘s Det er Ales (Aliss at the Fire). Signe and Asle are a married couple with no children who live in the large house where Asle and his forebears grew up, next to a fjord. In this book they spend much time staring out of the windows at the fjord. In March 2002, Signe is still staring. Fifteen years previously, Asle had gone for a walk in bad weather and saw Aliss, his great-great-grandmother, with the two year old Kristoffer, his great-great grandfather, both, of course, long since dead. This is not the only example of two events that took place many years apart seeming to be happening at the same time. Asle then goes out in his small boat in rough weather. He never returns and only his boat is found. Signe keeps waiting for him and keeps seeing him. This is another original work from Fosse, with the strange time conflation, the gloomy, ominous fjord and the focus almost entirely on Signe and Asle, making for an intense story.