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A child is born. He will be named Johannes. He will become a fisherman. An old man passed away. His name is Johannes. He was a fisherman. Taking birth as morning and death as night, at the two ends of morning and night, the long life of the child\u002F old man Johannes is reduced to one day: it begins with the thoughts of little Johannes's father Ola when his wife gave birth, and finally old Johannes watches his coffin being slowly buried. Love, work, upbringing, the unfilled ashtray and coffee cup on the kitchen counter in the morning, all kinds of moments and everyday objects in mortal life are given solemn and shining meaning by "existence" at this moment. The sun and the moon come and go, everything changes, and life rotates. Eternity is like a day.

"I sit, listen, and write everything I hear." Sound is the key to unlocking the "Fosse Universe". The sea, the rain, the undercurrent or the still water in the deep heart, the words that recur and change, the long or short stillness, everything is built according to the sound, and flows in response to the sound. Nine stories, nine parallel lives. The guitar man who sings day after day in the subway, the "man" and "woman" who meet by chance in the church cemetery in autumn, the "him" and "she" who are far away from the city and do not expect anyone to come, the husband who has not returned from a summer sea trip and the wife who is entangled in memories... Each and every nameless person, with few hints of personality or background, only a few sketches, we describe their faces in our imagination and listen to their life experiences. We discovered that the stories played out in "Fosse Universe" are the lives of every ordinary person, including ourselves. The loneliness of being helpless, the frustration of being unable to communicate, the irreparable loss of the love of the heart... The joys, sorrows and joys of life are all concentrated in Fosse's concise language that contains great emotional tension. Between the lines is his infinite compassion for all of us who meet in the wasteland of time.

The masterpiece of the 2023 Nobel Prize winner, a model of "slow prose" novels, a literal translation of the original Norwegian text. With a minimalist and dense narrative, surging and bursting emotions, a couple escapes for survival and wanders on the desolate land. We are all looking for spiritual peace in a world that seems to have many choices and many different ways to live. The novel begins with the young lovers Asle and Alida leaving their hometown and heading to Bjorgven (Bergen): Alida is pregnant, but they have difficulty finding a place to live and have to wander in the cold autumn rain. Later they found a place to live and gave birth to their son Sigvar Jr. One day when Asler was out, someone from his hometown recognized him and pointed out the crimes he had committed in the past... Years later, Alida's daughter Alice also grew old. She saw her dead mother again and recalled her half-brother Sigvar. The life experiences of descendants and ancestors overlap in an inevitable fate.