Blurbs

“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 (on The Other Name)

“Fosse’s portrait of memory remarkably refuses. It will not be other than: indellible as paint, trivial as nail clippings, wound like damp string. This book reaches out of its frame like a hand.” — Jesse Ball

“Jon Fosse is a major European writer.” — Karl Ove Knausgaard

Interview with Fosse

The New Yorker: “He struck me, above all, as a profoundly kind person, as expressed by his willingness to speak about everything: grace, love, jealousy, and peace, his near-death experiences, and his love of translating.”

Other Fosse translations

Aliss at the Fire
Morning and Evening
Scenes from a Childhood (stories)
forthcoming:
Melancholy I-II (reissue of Part I with a new translation of Part II)

Reviews

“Fosse’s portrait of intersecting lives is that rare metaphysical novel that readers will find compulsively readable.” — Publishers Weekly, starred review

“The translation by Damion Searls is deserving of special recognition. His rendering of this remarkable single run-on sentence over three volumes is flawless. The rhythms, the shifts in pace, the nuances in tone are all conveyed with masterful understatement. The Septology series is among the highlights of my reading life.” — Rónán Hession, Irish Times

“Fosse’s fusing of the commonplace and the existential, together with his dramatic forays into the past, make for a relentlessly consuming work: already [with The Other Name] Septology feels momentous.” —The Guardian

“Beautifully and movingly strange.... Septology showcases a static protagonist who stares endlessly at a painting, seeking its meaning while ruminating on his past. The book sounds, in summary, terrible: pretentious, self-serious, unendurable. This makes it all the more remarkable how wonderful it is.... 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.”
— Wyatt Mason, Harper’s

“There is, in this book’s rhythmic accumulation of words, something incantatory and self-annihilating —something that feels almost holy.” — Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

“A deeply moving experience. At times while reading the first two books of Septology, I walked around in a fugue-like state, wondering what it was that I was reading, exactly. A parable? A gospel? A novel bereft of the usual markings of plot, time, and character? The answer appeared to be all of the above, but although I usually balk at anything mystical, the effect was haunting and cumulative.... 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, New York Review of Books

“Fosse calls this ‘slow prose,’ yet this doesn’t necessarily make for slow reading; you can fight a current, trying to cling to what you know, or you can let go and take the risk of drowning.... [Searls] deserves much praise for bringing Fosse to an English-speaking audience over the past two decades.... And at a time when the scope of so many novels has narrowed to what their thinly disguised authors ate for breakfast, Fosse’s belief that writing about mundane details can lead us away from the kitchen table and to the discovery of ‘something that silently speaks in and behind the words and sentence’ makes his Septology, for all its self-doubt, worth every risk of reading.” — Kevin Brazil, TLS

“Fosse’s finest work to date.” — European Literature Network

“Masterful.... From the very first word, I wanted to read the book straight through in one go.... A brilliant novel.... Fosse’s way of ‘painting’ pictures in words is gripping and truly different from what can be found in any other literature.... A simplified universe full of wonder, intensity, and warm humor.” — Bergens Tidende