Reader Score
89%
89% of readers
recommend this book
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 Times Editors' Choice
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker and Bookforum
Selected as one of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century by The New York Times
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.
"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
"It ties 2666 by Roberto Bolaño as my favorite book from the 21st century... What I read was nothing less than a desperate prayer made radiant by sudden spikes of ecstatic beauty."--Lauren Groff, Literary Hub
"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
"Fosse's portrait of intersecting lives is that rare metaphysical novel that readers will find compulsively readable."--Publishers Weekly, 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
"Its striking characters and whiplash prose make for compulsive reading, engrossing from the start, unforgettable at the end."--World Literature Today
"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
"Jon Fosse is a major European writer."--Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of My Struggle