Septology VI - VII: A New Name
Asle is an ageing painter and widower who lives alone on the southwest coast of Norway. 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.
In this final instalment of Jon Fosse’s Septology, the major prose work by ‘the Beckett of the twenty-first century’ (Le Monde), Christmas is approaching. Tradition has it that Åsleik and Asle eat lutefisk together, but this year Asle has agreed for the first time to celebrate Christmas with Åsleik and his sister, Guro. On Christmas Eve, Åsleik, Asle, and the dog Bragi take Åsleik’s boat out on the Sygnefjord. Meanwhile, we follow the lives of the two Asles as younger adults in flashbacks: the narrator meets his lifelong love, Ales; joins the Catholic Church; starts exhibiting with Beyer; and can make a living by trying to paint away all the pictures stuck in his mind. After a while, Asle and Ales leave the city and move to the house in Dylgja. The other Asle gets married too, but his wedding ends with a sobbing bride and is followed soon after by a painful breakup.
Written in melodious and hypnotic ‘slow prose’, A New Name: Septology VI-VII is a transcendent exploration of the human condition and a radically other reading experience – incantatory, hypnotic, and utterly unique.
Jon Fosse takes his writing to places where no other Norwegian author can follow him.
Sindre Hovdenakk, VG
A beautiful final volume about art, yearning, and passion. Jon Fosse concludes his masterpiece Septology with outstanding novelistic art. – 6/6 stars
Gro Jørstad Nilsen, Bergens Tidende
The whole Septology can be read on one level as a staging of Meister Eckhart’s mysticism. The way Fosse uses repetitions has an almost hypnotic effect on the reader, much like the prayer for Asle running through all three volumes. Silence is also an element Fosse uses in the composition, which makes this an outstanding novel. The unspoken things concerning Asle’s dead sister Alida emerge as an almost “luminous” silence… The playground from the first volume returns with a richer meaning here. In Fosse’s rich and innovative Septology, this unforgettable moment becomes timeless literary art.
Gro Jørstad Nilsen BT
Septology reeks of greatness. […] Jon Fosse has done it again. The series will remain a pre-eminent work in Fosse’s oeuvre, and, dare I say, in the Norwegian canon. […] This book is a depiction of growing up, of becoming an artist, a story about love and friendship, about loneliness and longing.
Ulla Svalheim, Vårt Land
After I finished the last book of Septology, I walked around in a haze for a long while, simply grateful to be alive. The work is so breathtakingly strange and unclassifiable that it seemed to me as though Fosse had created a new form of fiction, something that has a deep kinship to Samuel Beckett’s work, but is infinitely more gentle and God-soaked.
Lauren Groff, The Guardian
Jon Fosse
Photo: Agnete Brun
Jon Fosse awarded The Nobel Prize in Literature 2023
Jon Fosse, born in 1959, is widely considered one of the most important writers of our time. For almost forty years he has written novels, plays, poems, stories, essays, and children’s books. His award-winning work has been translated into more than fifty languages, and his plays have been staged over a thousand times all over the world.
Jon Fosse grew up in Strandebarm, a small village in the western part of Norway, he lives today in the Grotten, an honorary residence in Oslo, as well as in Hainburg, Austria, and Frekhaug, Norway.
Fosse’s longest work of prose to date is Septology (2019–21), which he started during a break from playwrighting and after converting to Catholicism in 2013. Fosse has called his method of writing Septology ”slow prose”: a style of shifting levels, scenes, and reflections, the exact opposite of fast-paced drama. Its seven parts have been published in three volumes: The Other Name, I Is Another, and A New Name. It is a suggestive, magnificent narrative about the nature of art and God, about alcoholism, friendship, love, and the passage of time. Septology is translated into over 20 languages and is critically acclaimed worldwide.
For Septology, Jon Fosse has received numerous awards, including the Brage Prize and the Critics’ Prize. He has also been shortlisted for the international Booker Prize and the American National Book Award.
Furthermore, the hiatus in playwriting is over; Fosse is once again writing for the theater. Since 2020, three new plays have premiered. Jon Fosse’s most recent prose work, the novel Kvitleik (A Shining) was released in spring 2023 — a luminous narrative exploring the boundary between life and death.
In 2023, Fosse is also celebrating a literary milestone, marking 40 years since his debut with the novel Raudt, svart (Red, black).
Fosse is the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2023 and has received numerous prizes, both in Norway and internationally through the years.
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