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Jon Fosse can't stop producing novels, plays, poems, essays - or disputes about his place in European letters.
WHO HAS BEEN THE MAIN INSPIRATION FORJON FOSSESamuel Beckett or Robert De Niro? For champions of the 51 -year-old Norwegian novelist, playwright, poet and essayist, Fosse's mantric approach to social relationships makes him the most accomplished contemporary disciple of the Irish playwright-novelist. For those who have grown restless with his penchant for reiterating and then reiterating again arid prose observations or stage dialogue, the experience is like being trapped in a room with De Niro's Taxi Driver character of Travis Bickle and being badgered with "You looking at me? You looking at me? Are you sure you're not looking at me?" Given that span of views, it hardly came as a surprise that the recent awarding of the 2010 Ibsen Prize to Fosse has left critics, especially those in Norway, facing one another over barricades.
The award-giving committee, chaired by actor-director Liv UIlmann, spared little praise in explaining its choice. According to the panel, Fosse has forged his way "into an existential, partially religious-tinted authorship that stands alone in contemporary theater." The Haugesund native was also extolled for "forcing the theater and its audiences to think in new ways. He is the poet of the unknown. That may be how we can explain his immense success: He provides us with something we lack."
Certainly, there is no contesting Fosse's popularity. Varying estimates have counted between 700 and 900 productions in 40 languages of his more than two dozen plays in Europe, Japan, Australia and Chile. In the United States, he has become something of a crusade for the theatrical presentations of Sarah Sunde and Anna Gutto. This is all the more notable insofar as playwriting did not attract him until the 1 994 production oîOgAldri Skaï Vi Skiljast Ana We'll Never Be Parted), more than a decade after he had established himself as a novelist. Nor was the Ibsen Prize an attempt to make up for previously denied honors for a man who has described himself as ein noko eksent/isk diktar (a somewhat eccentric writer). On the contrary, Fosse already had to be in the market for an extra mantelpiece or two for such earlier acknowledgements...