The Other Name: Septology I-II

by Jon Fosse, Damion Searls (Translator)

Overview

WINNER OF THE 2023 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

Longlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize

“Fosse’s fusing of the commonplace and the existential, together with his dramatic forays into the past, make for a relentlessly consuming work: already Septology feels momentous.”—The Guardian

The Other Name follows the lives of two men living close to each other on the west coast of Norway. The year is coming to a close and Asle, an aging painter and widower, is reminiscing about his life. He lives alone, his only friends being his neighbor, Åsleik, a bachelor and traditional Norwegian fisherman-farmer, and Beyer, a gallerist who lives in Bjørgvin, a couple hours’ drive south of Dylgja, where he lives. There, in Bjørgvin, lives another Asle, also a painter. He and the narrator are doppelgangers—two versions of the same person, two versions of the same life.

Written in hypnotic prose that shifts between the first and third person, The Other Name calls into question concrete notions around subjectivity and the self. What makes us who we are? And why do we lead one life and not another? Through flashbacks, Fosse deftly explores the convergences and divergences in the lives of both Asles, slowly building towards a decisive encounter between them both. A writer at the zenith of his career, with The Other Name, the first two volumes in his Septology, Fosse presents us with an indelible and poignant exploration of the human condition that will endure as his masterpiece.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781945492419
Publisher:	Transit Books
Publication date:	04/07/2020
Series:	Septology , #1
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	388,846
File size:	746 KB

About the Author

Damion Searls is a translator from German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch and a writer in English. He has translated many classic modern writers, including Proust, Rilke, Nietzsche, Walser, Ingeborg Bachmann, Alfred Döblin, Jon Fosse, Elfriede Jelinek, and Nescio.

Jon Fosse is one of Norway’s most celebrated authors and playwrights. He was born in 1959 on the west coast of Norway and is the recipient of countless prestigious prizes, both in his native Norway and abroad. Since his 1983 fiction debut, Raudt, svart [Red, Black], Fosse has written prose, poetry, essays, short stories, children’s books, and over forty plays, with more than a thousand productions performed and translations into fifty languages.

Editorial Reviews

★ 02/17/2020

The first two installments of Fosse’s wondrous septology (after Morning and Evening) sustain a riveting stream of consciousness in a single rhythmic sentence. A graying painter named Asle drives back and forth from the remote Norwegian seaside town of Dylgja to Bjørgvin, where a gallery shows his work. As he begins to drive out of Bjørgvin, he worries about another painter, also named Asle, whom he regrets not visiting there. He stops the car and walks through a snowy playground; observing a couple, he darkly desires to “paint them away” so that the “picture will disappear... and the uneasiness inside me will stop.” Along with worry and unease, Asle is haunted by memories of the childhood deaths of a neighbor boy and Asle’s sister. While he wanders in the snow, a woman recognizes him and invites him back to her house; he claims not to know her, and readers will understand she has mistaken him for the other Asle. Fosse’s recursive narrative has echoes of such literary contemporaries as Ben Lerner and Karl Ove Knausgaard, while his deep focus on minutiae calls to mind Nathalie Sarraute. Fosse’s portrait of intersecting lives is that rare metaphysical novel that readers will find compulsively readable. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

‘Jon Fosse is a major European writer.’
— Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of My Struggle

‘Fosse has written a strange mystical moebius strip of a novel, in which an artist struggles with faith and loneliness, and watches himself, or versions of himself, fall away into the lower depths. The social world seems distant and foggy in this profound, existential narrative, which is only the first part of what promises to be a major work of Scandinavian fiction.’
— Hari Kunzru, author of White Tears

‘There is, in this book’s rhythmic accumulation of words, something incantatory and self-annihilating — something that feels almost holy.’
— Wall Street Journal

‘Over the past two decades, Jon Fosse, a playwright, poet, essayist and children’s author as well as a novelist, has won almost every award going in Norway, while his “slow prose” has gained him a cult following in English translation. He has been compared to Ibsen and Beckett, and his writing has elements of both the former’s severity and the latter’s use of insistent repetition.... The work simply loops and flows. The style is formal, yet with a sense of restlessness. As for plot, there is plenty.... Fosse’s fusing of the commonplace and the existential, together with his dramatic forays into the past, make for a relentlessly consuming work: already Septology feels momentous.’
— Catherine Taylor, Guardian

‘Fosse’s portrait of intersecting lives is that rare metaphysical novel that readers will find compulsively readable.’
— Publishers Weekly, starred review

‘Deeply enigmatic though never obscure, the novel presents questions [...] But to understand how completely these things elude comprehension, and to clothe their fundamental mystery in such gorgeous raiment, is an achievement no less profound.’
— Dustin Illingworth, The Nation

From the Publisher

★ 2020-01-13
The first two sections of Norwegian novelist Fosse's (Morning and Evening, 2015, etc.) 1,250-page "septology" on life in a disaffecting world.

Fosse is often mentioned as a leading contender for the Nobel Prize in literature. The present book has a fittingly Joycean sweep, opening in medias res with "And," that establishes him as a contender. Asle is a painter who lives in the small coastal village of Dylgja. He is widowed and lonely, and painting doesn't bring him much pleasure: "I think, it's time to put it away, I don't want to stand here at the easel any more, I don't want to look at it any more, I think and I think today's Monday and I think I have to put this picture away with the other ones I'm working on but am not done with.…" So Asle thinks, one onrushing thought spilling into and fueling another one, in a narrative that is almost unbroken except for occasional bits of dialogue. "When I paint it's always as if I'm trying to paint away the pictures stuck inside me," Asle reveals. But which Asle? There's another one of him up the coast in the small city of Bjørgvin, where a gallery exhibits the work of the first Asle. The second is a true doppelgänger save that his life choices were different: He took the roads that the first Asle did not only to wind up in much the same place. Shivering, seemingly moribund, the second Asle is an object of pity and concern for the first, who steals glimpses of him from time to time. Along the way, Fosse, who shifts between first- and third-person narration, meditates on religion (especially Catholicism, a minority religion in Norway), art, the nature of life, and other weighty topics: "to tell the truth there's not much that makes me happy any more," the first Asle reveals, and we believe him. It's a challenging read but an uncommonly rich one. Transit Books will publish the final two volumes of the book in 2021 and 2022.

A literary experiment that invites comparison to the modernists of a century ago, poetic and charged with meaning.

Kirkus Reviews