The Other Name - (Septology) by Jon Fosse (Paperback)

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 first volume of the celebrated Norwegian writer's Septology.

Book Synopsis

The lives of an aging painter and his doppelganger converge and diverge in an elegiac meditation on our unlived lives, in the first volume of the celebrated Norwegian writer's Septology.

Review Quotes

"An extraordinary seven-novel sequence about an old man's recursive reckoning with the braided realities of God, art, identity, family life and human life itself... The books feel like the culminating project of an already major career."-Randy Boyagoda, The New York Times

"With Septology, Fosse has found a new approach to writing fiction, different from what he has written before and--it is strange to say, as the novel enters its fifth century--different from what has been written before. Septology feels new."--Wyatt Mason, Harper's

"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

"In The Other Name's rhythmic accumulation of words, [there is] something incantatory and self-annihilating--something that feels almost holy."--Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

"The Other Name trembles with the beauty, doubt, and gnostic weariness of great religious fiction. In Fosse's hands, God is a difficult, pungent, overwhelmingly aesthetic force, 'the invisible inside the visible.'"--Dustin Illingworth, The Nation

"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

About the Author

Jon Fosse is one of Norway's most celebrated authors and playwrights, and was awared 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.