“I don’t go out anymore, a restlessness has come over me, and I don’t go out.”
The line caught. Not as drama, but as the texture of a mind tightening inwards. I had just come from Fosse’s essays, where he writes of the rare astonishment of reading later in life, the comfort he found in Bernhard’s repetitions. The affinities are there: circling syntax, a narrator trapped in obsessive motion. But Fosse’s register is tuned to a quieter disturbance. There is little rage, no theatricality. Only the persistent grain of unease, the slow bleed of a past that will not recede.
There is also, crucially, none of Bernhard’s humour. Fosse’s prose does not crack or bite. Where Bernhard undercuts repetition with a bitter wit, Fosse remains solemn. His rhythms are not performative, but interior. What irony exists is latent, almost imperceptible. The result is less catharsis than intensification. The repetition does not release. It thickens.
In Boathouse, what returns is not memory but presence, dislocated and dimly unbearable. The reappearance of a childhood friend fractures the narrator’s containment. What follows is not a story in any linear sense, but a coiling around places that cannot be left behind: the boathouse, the mother’s home, the paths along the water. The landscape does not merely frame the mood. It internalises it. The waves are not described, they are heard “in a special way, like they used to roll before,” distorted by unease.
A week after finishing it, the novel has not left. It deposits its weight slowly, like something remembered before it was ever known.
Thank you for sharing your impressions of this novel. I’m definitely going to order this one. I have become greatly interested in foreign literature this past year, and the emphasis on the landscape of the novel sounds quite interesting. Additionally, I will be interested to see how he handles the landscape of the sea, as well. I read Waves by Eduard von Keyserling this past year (and entirely different novel than Boathoase), but the sea played a large role in the book. Additionally, I am two thirds of the way through Conrad’s Victory (and plan to read Nostromo this year), and he is another individual who focuses much of his writing on the sea, too, though, of course, in an entirely different way as well.
I hope you are enjoying your holiday season, and I continue to enjoy your blog immensely.
Thank you for the kind words. I hope you are also enjoying a good holiday. Thanks for reading and taking the time to make always thoughtful comments. It is very much appreciated.
Fosse’s Boathouse rewards rereading to note closely how we uses interiors as a way of viewing the world. I’ll be reading more Fosse, but know from secondary material I’ve read online that the fjord landscape is central to his novels. Conrad’s Nostromo is always on my list of omissions to address.