The Other Name: Septology I-II
Jon Fosse
The Other Name follows the lives of two men living close to each other on the west coast of Norway. The year is coming to a close and Asle, an aging painter and widower, is reminiscing about his life. He lives alone, his only friends being his neighbor, Åsleik, a bachelor and traditional Norwegian fisherman-farmer, and Beyer, a gallerist who lives in Bjørgvin, a couple hours’ drive south of Dylgja, where he lives. more
351 pages, Paperback
First published Fitzcarraldo Editions
4.11
Rating
3152
Ratings
534
Reviews
Jon Fosse
206 books 1069 followers
Jon Olav Fosse was born in Haugesund, Norway and currently lives in Bergen. He debuted in 1983 with the novel Raudt, svart (Red, black). His first play, Og aldri skal vi skiljast, was performed and published in 1994. Jon Fosse has written novels, short stories, poetry, children's books, essays and plays. His works have been translated into more than forty languages. He is widely considered as one of the world's greatest contemporary playwrights. Fosse was made a chevalier of the Ordre national du Mérite of France in 2007. Fosse also has been ranked number 83 on the list of the Top 100 living geniuses by The Daily Telegraph.He was awarded The Nobel Prize in Literature 2023 "for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable".
Since 2011, Fosse has been granted the Grotten, an honorary residence owned by the Norwegian state and located on the premises of the Royal Palace in the city centre of Oslo. The Grotten is given as a permanent residence to a person specifically bestowed this honour by the King of Norway for their contributions to Norwegian arts and culture.
Community reviews
05. 10. 2023 Now the deserved winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2023 and the perfect nudge to read this one again. I do enjoy Scandinavian literature, especially the Norwegian one, I think, so I think it is good idea to start the Man Booker Longlist with The Other Name, written by a Norwegian, the other two novels I read were 5 stars, I think, reviews for this were positive, I think, What can go wrong. more
The Other Name is a continuous, without a single break, stream of consciousness… And Jon Fosse is smoothly maneuvering between Thomas Bernhard and Samuel Beckett…The hero is an old pretentious artist dwelling in the world of fake values……I take another look at the picture with the two lines crossing, both in impasto as they put it, and the paint has run a little and where the lines cross the colours have turned such a strange colour, a beautiful colour, with no name, they usually don’t have names because obviously there can’t be names for all the countless colours in the world, I think and I step a few feet back from the picture and stop and look at it and then turn off the light and stand there looking at the picture in the dark…But first of all he is a human being… And he possesses his own unique individuality… And he lives his own unique life… Methodically performing his everyday customary moves he keeps incessantly analyzing his steps and motives and remembering his past life: his family, his childhood, his young years, his married life, his relatives, his artistry, friends and people he knew… And in all his remembrances and contemplations there is a hint at the slight shift in reality and a vague tinge of duality and ambiguity……they think God is the reason why anything exists at all, and that’s true, yes, there are skies so beautiful that no painter can match them, and clouds, yes, in their endless movements, always the same and always different, and the sun and the moon and the stars, yes, but there are also corpses, decay, stenches, things that are withered and rotten and foul, and everything visible is just visible, whether it’s good or bad, whether it’s beautiful or ugly, but whatever is worth anything, what shines, the shining darkness, yes, is the invisible in the visible, whether it’s in the most beautiful clouds in the sky or in what dies and rots, because the invisible is present in both what dies and what doesn’t die, the invisible is present in both what rots and what doesn’t rot, yes, the world is both good and evil, beautiful and ugly, but in everything, yes, even in the worst evil, there is also the opposite, goodness, love, yes, God is invisibly present there too, because God does not exist, He is, and God is in everything that exists…Our life isn’t just what we are doing; our life is also a stream of our thoughts. more
Update 5/10/2023 - he's won the Noble. Update: I have finished now all 3 parts of this novel published separately. And this, first part, has created the most strong impression on me. But all observations below could be equally referred to the novel as whole. There is an episode somewhere close to the beginning when a young man pushing his girlfriend on the swings. more
CONGRATULATIONS TO JON FOSSE FOR WINNING THE 2023 NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE "I already have ten or so big paintings finished plus four or five small ones, something like that, fourteen paintings in all in two stacks next to each other by the kitchen door, since I'm about to have a show, most of the paintings are approximately square. " So Asle tells us on the opening page of The Other Name. Asle is a painter living alone on the southwest coast of Norway. I can imagine one of his paintings in the stacks might look something like the artwork above. Or, perhaps this bold diagonal brushstroke can be likened to a section of his largest canvas, the one Asle is working on now, the one on the easel in his studio, a large rectangular painting, wider than it is high, one thick diagonal line painted in brown, the other thick diagonal line painted in purple, the two thick dripping lines crossing in the middle. more
‘And I will give him a white stone, and on the stone a new name written, which no one knows except him who receives it. ’—Revelation 2:17it’s always, always the darkest part of the picture that shines the most, and I think that that might be because it’s in the hopelessness and despair, in the darkness, that God is closest to usThe Other Name: Septology I-II has been translated by Damion Searls (he of the magnificent translation of Anniversaries) from Jon Fosse’s Det andre namnet Septologien I-II, and published by the wonderful Fitzcarraldo Editions. Searls has said that he learned Norwegian specifically to be able to read, and ultimately translate, Fosse (https://www. theparisreview. org/blog/2. more
Yesterday I came across this quote from Ezra Pound: Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand. I want to pause here to think about the serendipity of finding just the right quote to describe the experience of reading Jon Fosse's The Other Name, because serendipity, or good-reading-luck as I like to think of it, is something that often follows me, the right quote pops up or I have a relevant dream or something else happens that throws light on the book I've just read and the often puzzling thoughts that it has left me with. All that is just to underline how appropriate I found Pound's quote about a book being like 'a ball of light in one's hand' because all the passages I'd marked in Fosse's puzzling and dark book concerned light, in particular the way light can be rendered in a painting. The light described was 'ball of light' bright and it illuminated the whole book for me. more
My dopplegänger (Aen) and I (also Aen, because all names start with an “A”) decided to read The Other Name by Jon Fosse, yes, and Karl Ove Knausgaard, a fellow Norwegian writer with no shortage of “A”s in his name as well, calls Fosse “a major European writer,” I think, and I must admit that Fosse out-Knausgaards Knausgaard because Karl Ove is known, I think, for writing about minutiae, and Jon sees him and raises him one, yes, and I think too Fosse put copy and paste to good use, yes, because many times he writes the same thing Karl Ove-r and Ove-r such that the book reads like waves, yes, like Virginia Woolf, I think, or Bach’s music, maybe, because the most ordinary of actions and thoughts, I think, keep appearing in this narrative, which also includes the most ordinary of actions and thoughts, and I think at first that I might not like reading about One Name or The Other Name because surely they’re the same name, Asle, but I get used to it as I read, I think, and it becomes easier as I read, and I ignore the voice of my old grammar teacher and his big fear of comma splices, I think, and it’s true after awhile that the book is like a painting that seems to have a certain light projecting from its dependable Norwegian darkness, yes, but Aen says people believe Scandinavians are the happiest people in the world, and I say I think that is only the Danes, I say, yes, the Danes are the happiest people in the world, though I don’t know what makes them so happy, perhaps it could be bikes, I say, and Aen says yes, there are the bikes, perhaps, and we see that the book is divided in two sections, I think, the second being all Hansel and Gretel like about young Asle and his sister being disobedient children in repetitious ways by going to the Wharf, I think, and the rowboat, yes, and the Co-Op and the Dairy, and sister keeps saying no, Mother will be displeased because she says never do this and never do that, no, and Asle, he is disobedient and says yes and eventually will regret too many yeses, I think, by the end, I mean, and then Aen says to me that there are yet two more books of this, I think, and I say, yes, I might just read them because under all the maddening repetition, I think, and the comma splices, I think, and the paragraphs that go on and on, not to mention the topic, yes, it can grow dreary, but it is artful dreary, I think, so yes, maybe, just as I read all but one of Karl Ove's navel-gazing but fun books I can some day, I think, read all but one of Fosse's, or maybe even all of them if Bragi is included, because Bragi is my favorite character in The Other Name, I think, so cheerful, and the way he barks and shakes off snow, and the way he looks at Asle with his innocent little eyes that have no dark Scandinavian pasts, I think, yes, maybe, but first I need some rest because I am so terribly tired, I think, and the The Country Inn has a room for me, and in the bedside table instead of a Bible will be Fosse's second book of the Septology, maybe, but first I need some sleep, I think, because Aen says I look tired and I shouldn't write anymore, no, else our review will look like I'm a major North American writer, I think, or at least American writer, maybe, or Maine writer, yes, that, at the very least that, I think. more
Longlisted for the Booker International Prize 2020This book is intense and personal. It is a continuous monologue with no sentence or paragraph breaks, the only exceptions being line breaks before and after reported speech, a few question and exclamation breaks and the header pages for section II. That sounds difficult to read, but other than the problem of finding suitable break points it felt surprisingly easy to read, if rather more difficult to decode. The book describes two consecutive days in the life of its narrator Asle, a widowed painter who lives alone on a remote fjord in the village or hamlet of Dylgja. On the first day he drives to Bjørgvin (described as the second city, so a fictionalised Bergen), which is where his friend Beyer runs a gallery that exhibits and sells his paintings. more
A beautiful, quiet book about the daily life and memories of a modestly successful ageing Norwegian artist and his alcoholic doppelganger and namesake - the latter a man who seems to embody "there but for the grace of God go I". It is so meditative and form-orientated that it remakes themes as profound which in a more conventional novel would be cheesy and didactic. It could sound solipsistic, with characters reflecting one another in name as well as life: Asle, Asle, Åsleik, Ales, Alise, and taking place entirely in a small area of Norway, in an analogue for Bergen and its rural hinterland, among reclusive older people. Yet it feels spacious and expansive, and it is aware of hard subsistence manual work and the good fortune of those able to make a living by art; of how incidents like abuse can turn a life on a sixpence; of have and have-not, and is generous in understanding and support towards the latter. It seems to lay down no overt rules for its metaphysical spacetime, where a man can observe his younger self as a passer-by, and be friends with what appears to be another less fortunate self of his own age - who coexists several miles away, rather than being in a parallel universe or on a separate timeline. more
Юн Фоссе совершенно не торопится с изложением, в книге напрочь отсутствует динамизм, мысли рассказчикрв крутятся вокруг одних и тех же событий и слов, циклично повторяясь, герои в десятый, сотый раз перебирают их в голове. Хоровод этих мыслей звучит рефреном, бубнит и не отпускает. Эти постоянные "говорит он", "думает он" создают какой-то ритм, как в шаманских заклинаниях, а иногда напоминает рассказ человека с особенностями ментального развития. Действительно, Асле упоминает, что у него были сложности со школьной программой. Не тронуть этот роман не может, хотя он по-северному суров, строг и где-то скучен. more
BETWEEN ART AND GODIn this monumental work, Fosse manages to reflect in the most delicate way on life, art, love, religion, choices made in life. The protagonist Asle, an old man passing through a critical moment, relives certain important moments of his life over a period of several days around Christmas. With the Scandinavian fjords in the background and the Norwegian desert landscape providing a perfect basis for reflection, the painter Asle wanders outside and inside himself, on the verge of a major existential crisis, determined by the loss of reference points: on the one hand painting, Art, on the other Faith, both accentuated by the death of his wife, an event he never managed to get over. Fosse's prose is hypnotic because he follows Asle's inner struggle in sentences hundreds of pages long, and because he repeats the key concepts and scenes in his discourse dozens of times, while also revealing, when less expected, novelties and plot twists. That’s to say I believe SEPTOLOGY could be regarded as a universal literary masterpiece focussed on the exploration of the meaning of life. more
Not gonna lie, the first time I encountered this book and saw that Karl Ove Knausgård praised it, I immediately was turned off. I have this strange antipathy towards Karl, I have never read him, but, I mean, anyone who names his magnum opus same as Hitler’s autobiography to me instantly looks like a pretentious edgelord. And then I read reviews and it sounded like he’s an untalented pretentious edgelord. But then the same critics, who were critical of Karl, praised this book, so I gave it a second thought. It turned out to be… interesting. more
The Nobel committee is playing it too safe. more
Weltliteratur. Etwas nie Dagewesenes. Ein Buch, das mir wochenlange Übelkeit beschert - um Worte ringen lässt. Gedanken fließen, verästeln - Wachstumsschmerz. Existentielle Frage ätzen sich gnadenlos wie Alienspeichel, durch Mauern und Wälle einer mühsam errichteten inneren Ordnung, meiner Existenz. more
Did a review of this book here: https://youtu. be/-lbJlwg-prg . more
Beckett meets Knausgard, meets Master EckhartAs you can notice, this literally was a mixed bag for me. Disorientation is the first impression you get when you start this book, especially if you have not read any other work by the Norwegian writer Fosse before. The author offers an elongated stream of consciousness, with many repetitive elements and sentences without a period, 350 pages long. It is not clear who is speaking: the artist Asle or his friend/neighbor Asleik. Or are they one and the same person, or are there other characters with - coincidentally - the same name. more
128th book of 2023. 4. 5. So nearly a five but I'm holding back for whatever reason. I was underwhelmed by Fosse's slim novella, A Shining (though I found it an interesting piece of work nonetheless), but this is what I was hoping when I got into it. more
"Der andere Name" enthält die ersten beiden Teile der Heptalogie des Literaturnobelpreisträgers Jon Fosse. Es ist der mitreißende Gedankenstrom eines Künstlers an zwei aufeinander folgenden Tagen, Montag und Dienstag. Der Maler Asle wohnt in dem kleinen Dorf Dylgja. Der Fischer Åsleik ist sein Freund. Seine Frau Ales ist verstorben. more
Loved this, mostly. Felt like the perfectly digested, unique synthesis of Kafka, Bernhard, Beckett, and Knausgaard, somehow without seeming derivative. Yes, and some Joycean Molly Bloom soliloquy vibe in there too. Loved so much of this, really, particularly the blurred, misty, half-asleep, slant reality, the characters all named Alse or Ales or Alesik, blended like the two lines on the painting he's working on, two lines of thick oil paint intersecting, purple and brown, the horizontal line at an angle like a St. Andrews Cross, which one character never fails to mention and the narrator never fails to silently chide for mentioning. more
…we never had children, just the two of us, so why am I thinking I am driving home to my wife and child. it’s probably that I fall into a kind of stupor when I’m driving and when that happens thoughts can come to you, but I know perfectly well I’m not crazy, that I’m going home to my old house , home to Dylgja, to my house … the house where Ive lived alone all these years… There’s a theme in Jon Fosse’s The Other Name that I’m cheekily going to call confusion. It’s not confusion because I’m confused, though I am often disoriented, or taken to a narrative place that confounds me and what I knew before. It’s confusion in the sense that the day-to-day stream of thoughts (sometimes a kind of banter) in our own head is rarely ordered as though continuously narrated by a coherent person. I could also call this the self, because that feels more right for the way Fosse uses narrative; he is playing with an idea that we are not necessarily the same self we were say years earlier. more
Now re-re-read in preparation for the final volume (books VI-VII of Septology) because I decided to read all 7 parts back-to-back mainly as a treat to myself because I enjoy the books so much. This time through, I took more notice of the talk about creation of art (there's something new to think about every time) and I felt the ambiguity about the characters came through to me more (it is perhaps not as clear cut as my original review suggests it was and it is better when it is ambiguous). -------------------Now re-read in preparation for reading "I Is Another (Septology III-V)". I just want to add a quote from the book:". and, I think, it’s the same with the writing I like to read, what matters isn’t what it literally says about this or that, it’s something else, something that silently speaks in and behind the lines and the sentences. more
Reading this book was like a mystical experience. There is something very pure and otherworldly about Fosse’s prose — written in one long sentence, with minimal punctuation — as if transcribed from a place uncorrupted by the analytical forces of the brain. Think of it as a Rothko painting, or a mystical poem. This is not the type of writing I usually enjoy: the text is not particularly lyrical. In fact, it is stripped down and sparse. more
Das Bewusstsein im Moment kurz vor seinem Verlöschen, Erzählung ohne Erzählung, oder was bleibt, wenn nichts mehr bleibt. Eine literarische Katharsis. Ausführlicher, vielleicht begründeter auf kommunikativeslesen. com Eine der Begründungen für die Verleihung des Literaturnobelpreises im Jahr 2023 an Jon Fosse lautet, dass Fosse dieser dem Unsagbaren eine Stimme verleihe. In seinen eigenen Aussagen führt er dies näher aus, nämlich als das Schreiben eines Erzählers, der sich an der Grenze zwischen Leben und Tod befindet:[…] bald sind wir dort, denke ich und ich gehe weiter und ich schaue auf den Hund, der sich seinen Weg durch den Schnee bahnt, und er scheint etwas müde geworden zu sein, er keucht schlimm, denn es ist ein kleiner Hund und er hat schon ein paar Jahre auf dem Buckel, also bleibe ich stehen und hebe den Hund auf und dann gehe ich weiter, den Hund auf dem Arm, und ich denke nichts und es schneit immer weiter und kein Mensch ist zu sehen und es schneit immer weiter […] Fosses Roman „Der andere Name“ gehört zu jenen Büchern, die fast gar keinen äußerlichen Plot besitzen. more
Just like with Aliss at the Fire, Fosse's first volume of his Septology (which includes parts 1 and 2) was quite the reading experience. His stream of consciousness-style is like no other that I've ever read. You can't really compare him to Thomas Bernhard, Samuel Beckett or Laszlo Krasznahorkai. This ever-flowing work of memory and art is magical. The state it put me in while reading it was a sort of calm. more
…and even though I don’t understand why it’s at night, in the darkness, that God shows himself, yes well maybe it’s not so strange, not when you think about it, but there are people who see God better in the daylight, in flowers and trees, in clouds, in wind and rain, yes, in animals, in birds, in insects, in ants, in mice, in rats, in everything that exists, in everything that is, yes, there’s something of God in everything, that’s how they think, yes, they think God is the reason why anything exists at all, and that’s true, yes, there are skies so beautiful that no painter can match them, and clouds, yes, in their endless movements, always the same and always different, and the sun and the moon and the stars, yes, but there are also corpses, decay, stenches, things that are withered and rotten and foul, and everything visible is just visible, whether it’s good or bad, whether it’s beautiful or ugly, but whatever is worth anything, what shines, the shining darkness, yes, is the invisible in the visible…. more
The Difference Between Loose Writing and Inaccurate WritingI'd like to offer corrections to two ideas that are common in reviews of The Other Name and the Septology as a whole, and then propose a critique of the way the book is written. Reviewers often call the Septology and its author religious. That's true in a literal sense: both the author and the main character are converts to Catholicism, and we read the Lord's Prayer several times in Latin. (One reviewer said he skips those passages--an amazing lapse of critical responsibility. I won't name the reviewer. more
Pre par meseci kad je komisija Nobelove nagrade objavila da je Fose postao novi laureat, prvi utisak mi je bio ”hmm ček ko to beše” (praveći se da sam samo zaboravio naravno), samo da bih posle pročitao da je generalni utisak kolektivno olakšanje da je neko vredan dobio ovogodišnje priznanje (uz po koju kontroverzu, jer kako bi drugačije). Odem do knjižare (virtuelno, i dalje se nisam pomerio sa stolice), i naravno da je sve momentalno prodato. Par meseci kasnije, evo me (i dalje u stolici), i prva trećina Foseove septologije je pročitana. Prvobitna namera mi je bila da posle svake trećine uglavim neku drugu knjigu, za mali prekid, ali iako sam na kraju ipak započeo nešto sa strane, takođe sam nastavio svoj put kroz Septologiju. Toliko je Foseov stil bogat tim nekim seduktivnim kvalitetom, uvek jednostavnim, neretko meditativnim, da se čini da je život raskošniji, mirniji, važniji dok je roman njegov deo. more
A clichéd complaint about modern art is that it’s something a child could do – as if little or no thought has gone into the process behind it. In a way, “The Other Name” might serve as an extended riposte to this dismissive attitude as it details in 351 densely-packed pages an artist agonizing over two intersecting lines he’s painted on a canvass. Of course, it’s about much more than that but this is the primary dilemma at the centre of this deeply introspective novel. Asle is an artist living a sparse monastic existence in a small Norwegian village and his only real social contact is with a neighbour that clears the snow from his driveway. But he also occasionally encounters a doppelganger, an alcoholic artist also named Asle who lives some distance away and who he finds near death passed out in a snow drift. more
The best not-bad book I’ve read this year. It’s a lonely road to embark upon something that all your reading friends have pronounced wonderful and find it just okay. Just okay means you can’t even gather much steam to your disagreement. In fact, you can sort of see what all the fuss is about. The writer clearly has great talent and has put great thought into all of this. more
wszystko o tej książce już zostało powiedziane. zostawiła we mnie jakiś dziwny osad. uwielbiam za tę mantryczność, nieprzerwany strumień myśli, które w swoim rytmie uparcie kojarzyły mi się z mamrotaniem pacierza, a do tego jakąś gorączkę, kontrastującą z zimnem i śniegiem w treści, zupełnie niespodziewaną, ale tak to czułam. cała ta książka jest napisana obrazami i cały ich szereg mi po niej w głownie zostanie. bardzo dobre, chyba nawet wybitne. more