Sometimes the Swedish Academy actually gets the Nobel Prize in Literature right, as it did this year when it gave the award to Jon Fosse. The Norwegian playwright and novelist doesn’t represent any particular identity or ideology: he is an introverted writer from rural western Norway who likes hiking in the forest and messing around in small boats on the fjord. Nor is he anything at all like his former student, Karl Ove Knausgård, the poster child for “autofiction,” where a blend of memoir and fiction circle around the author’s quotidian life, often at great length and rarely to memorable effect.
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