About this item
Highlights
- The lives of an aging painter and his doppelganger converge and diverge in an elegiac meditation on our unlived lives, in the second book of the celebrated Norwegian writer's three-volumeSeptology.
- About the Author: Jon Fosse is one of Norway's most celebrated authors and playwrights, and was awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature.
- 330 Pages
- Fiction + Literature Genres, Literary
- Series Name: Septology
Description
About the Book
"The lives of an aging painter and his doppelganger converge and diverge in an elegiac meditation on our unlived lives, in the second book of the celebrated Norwegian writer's three-volume Septology."--Provided by publisher.Book Synopsis
The lives of an aging painter and his doppelganger converge and diverge in an elegiac meditation on our unlived lives, in the second book of the celebrated Norwegian writer's three-volumeSeptology.Review Quotes
"I hesitate to compare the experience of reading these works to the act of meditation. But that is the closest I can come to describing how something in the critical self is shed in the process of reading Fosse, only to be replaced by something more primal. A mood. An atmosphere. The sound of words moving on a page." -Ruth Margalit, The New York Review of Books
"This Norwegian masterpiece, by the winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature, is the kind of soul-cleansing work that seems to silence the cacophony of the modern world--a pair of noise-cancelling headphones in book form."--The New York Times
"The first two installments of Fosse's wondrous septology sustain a riveting stream of consciousness in a single rhythmic sentence... Fosse's portrait of intersecting lives is that rare metaphysical novel that readers will find compulsively readable."--Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
"Fosse is often mentioned as a leading contender for the Nobel Prize in literature. The present book has a fittingly Joycean sweep . . . that establishes him as a contender."--Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review
"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
Praise for Jon Fosse:
"The Beckett of the twenty-first century."--Le Monde
"Jon Fosse is less well-known in America than some other Norwegian novelists, but revered in Norway--winner of every prize, a leading Nobel contender. I think of the four elder statesmen of Norwegian letters as a bit like the Beatles: Per Petterson is the solid, always dependable Ringo; Dag Solstad is John, the experimentalist, the ideas man; Karl Ove Knausgaard is Paul, the cute one; and Fosse is George, the quiet one, mystical, spiritual, probably the best craftsman of them all . . . His writing is pure poetry."--The Paris Review, from an essay by the translator
"Fosse has been compared to Ibsen and to Beckett, and it is easy to see his work as Ibsen stripped down to its emotional essentials. But it is much more. For one thing, it has a fierce poetic simplicity."--The New York Times
"With its heavy silences and splintered dialogue, his work has reminded some of Beckett, others of Pinter."--The Guardian
"Fosse's prose . . . builds out of an ambiguity and sparseness and moves with a slow poetic intensity . . . The collection has all the hallmarks of Fosse's signature brooding manner where lyrical precision is used to paint unmoored psyches. An accumulation of moments when our essential emotions come into conflict with experience, Scenes from a Childhood is a welcome--if overdue--introduction to a singular literary voice."--Tank
"Fosse writes about the complexity and danger of the bleak Norwegian countryside as well as he writes about the passage of time through a life. In choosing to mostly focus on pieces about childhood, Searls has been able to show an impressive side to Fosse, because--in my experience at least--writing engaging prose about childhood trips up many otherwise competent writers . . . Fosse understands that a child's mind is not merely the mind of an ignorant adult, it is a different form of consciousness entirely: more curious, more optimistic, less scared . . . There are portraits of great happiness, great pleasure and great joy in Scenes From A Childhood."--Berfrois
"Fosse's vignettes beautifully reclaim the
About the Author
Jon Fosse is one of Norway's most celebrated authors and playwrights, and was awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature. 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.