Septology
ByPublisher Description
WINNER OF THE 2023 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
2022 International Booker Prize, Finalist
2022 National Book Award, Finalist
2022 National Book Critics Circle Award, Finalist
New York TimesEditors’ Choice
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker and Bookforum
What makes us who we are? And why do we lead one life and not another? Asle, an ageing painter and widower who lives alone on the southwest coast of Norway, is reminiscing about his life. His only friends are his neighbour, Åsleik, a traditional fisherman-farmer, and Beyer, a gallerist who lives in the city. There, in Bjørgvin, lives another Asle, also a painter but lonely and consumed by alcohol. Asle and Asle are doppelgängers—two versions of the same person, two versions of the same life, both grappling with existential questions about death, love, light and shadow, faith and hopelessness. The three volumes of Jon Fosse's Septology—The Other Name, I is Another, and A New Name—collected in for the first time in this limited hardcover edition, are a transcendent exploration of the human condition, and a radically other reading experience—incantatory, hypnotic, and utterly unique.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communities30 Reviews
aannafischer
Created 16 days agosaramagu
Created about 1 month agoTristan Tan
Created about 1 month ago
Zhou 🧛♀️
Created about 2 months ago
“If I could give 6 stars, I would.
I'll be honest – I took 4 entire months to get through this. Not because it was hard to read, but because it was the first book I've read in a long, long time and I just wasn't good at focusing. This book was so good that it made me pick up reading again after a decade. I stumbled upon it on a summer vacation, at a bookstore in Copenhagen, under the "Scandinavian Literature" section. It was probably the best thing that happened to me on that trip. I bought I-II first because I didn't want to commit to buying all 3 compilations at one go. I immediately got hooked, then returned to the same bookstore a few days later, only to find that III-V and VI-VII were gone! I had to buy the rest from the Fitzcarraldo online store.
Anyway, I read this series in sporadic bursts, then got distracted with life in between – but each time I came back to it, I'd be sucked into a magical trance. I have never read anything like this before. Yes, his sentences never end – but it doesn't confuse you or feel overbearing; it's a powerful meditation that pushes you forward gently, like a flowing river. Sometimes it turns into a vortex that pulls you in even further. Fosse's writing style brings you directly into his mind, you jump from one thought to another, a memory, the present, some intense rumination, and then snaps you back to simply being in the present again.
It just so happened that I finished the last part of the book on Christmas day over the holidays, while Asle was spending Christmas Eve in the story. That really added to my overall reading experience. It felt almost like... I was meant to drag this on for 4 months... so that I could finish the book on a perfect note.
Jon Fosse is now my favourite author, period. I bought his entire bibliography after finishing this, haha! I must also say that the translator Damion Searls did an amazing job, it must not have been easy to approach a work like this. That being said, I understand that his writing style is a love or hate thing – you can't possibly be neutral towards something this unconventional. I think it's genius.”Bryan
Created 2 months agoAbout Jon Fosse
Jon Fosse 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. Septology, his latest prose work, was initially published in three volumes by Transit Books, and is collected here in English for the first time.
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Damion Searls
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