Scenes from a Childhood

Fosse has provided the following note (2017): ‘In writing Scenes from a Childhood, my goal was to write about my own childhood, the way things really happened. That turned out to be impossible for me. What I wrote was similar to my own experience in some ways, but not a single one of these pieces ended up being entirely accurate. I cannot help writing fiction.

And the chasm is gone? you say. The chasm doesn’t exist any more, I say. And the stones shine in their own new pattern, you say. Yes, I say. What used to be in a chasm is now between the stones, I say.

Because it felt like the stones in the avalanche were me.

then I slept a good sleep there, on, or in, those grey shining stones, I slept

Stone and water, I say. Stone, stone and water. And I was an avalanche, bits of stone, and all the stones were as if in a grey fog that nevertheless seemed to shine a little from the crushed stones, and they were wonderfully sitting leaning against each other as if they’d arranged themselves properly into a kind of wall

Asle swims a little way off from the boat but realizes he can’t move his feet and then he tries to swim back to the boat but his legs don’t want to and he asks the people in the boat to reach out an oar to him and Åsmund reaches out an oar to him and pulls Asle into the boat. Åsmund takes Asle by the arms and pulls him back up into the boat. Asle is freezing and he gets dressed again. And then Asle has some more cider to drink.

Svein and I stand looking at Geir Henning’s coffin being lowered down into the ground. I think about his heavy breathing, his hoarse voice, his peeling skin. And I think that Geir Henning and I will always be friends.

is like music somehow in the novel, so he really likes it, but it’s not exactly the same as music, because he knows what music is but this is a kind of music where everything that goes back and forth stays quiet and nice to think about.

I didn’t dare say anything, didn’t dare look at her, but we sat together at the concert. Afterwards we wrote lots of letters. I got letters with lipstick kisses.

III.
She and a friend took the bus the two miles to where I lived. It was Easter and we went up into the mountains. We didn’t have skis, we went on foot, it was warm and unpleasant, the snow was slushy, we sank into it. We held hands a little.

my mother is going to be so scared when she sees how I’m bleeding, what should I do? I’m bleeding so much and I have to run upstairs up to my mother and do I really still have a bone in my mouth and I run upstairs and the blood is spurting and I need to keep calm.

II.
A man I don’t know is holding my arm in his lap. We are sitting in a car. My mother is there. My father is there. I can see, but not very clearly. I see home, the house. I don’t know anyone who’s died but now I’m going to die, even though I’m just seven years old. I’m not scared. I turn around, I look back at the houses. I think that this is the last time I’m going to see the house where I live.