Publishers Weekly
08/28/2023
Fosse follows up the voluminous Septology with the hypnotic story of a man lost in remote Norwegian woods. The unnamed narrator has taken an aimless drive and winds up on a narrowing forest road, where his car gets stuck in a rut. He knows he should go for help, but it’s cold and dark and he doesn’t know which way to go, or whether he would be able to reach another person on foot. Eventually, he sets out into the moonless darkness, and after a time an illuminated form comes toward him, its features expanding as the narrator grapples with what he’s seeing: “A shining whiteness. An outline of a person. A person inside a shining whiteness. Yes, maybe like that.” Later, as the illuminated form lingers and the narrator remains lost in the woods, he encounters his elderly parents, who turn out to be just as lost as he is, and who bicker among themselves about what they’re doing there. Searls translates with precision and playfulness as Fosse commits to his strange vision. It works because the narrator remains anchored in logic even as events unfold like a dream (“Maybe it’s something that’s only experienced, that’s not actually happening. But is it possible to only experience something and not have it be happening”). Fosse fans will savor this assured monologue of ethereal events. (Oct.)
From the Publisher
Fosse follows up the voluminous Septology with the hypnotic story of a man lost in remote Norwegian woods... Fosse fans will savor this assured monologue of ethereal events.”—Publishers Weekly
“Septology is the only novel I have read that has made me believe in the reality of the divine, as the fourteenth-century theologian Meister Eckhart, whom Fosse has read intently, describes it: 'It is in darkness that one finds the light, so when we are in sorrow, then this light is nearest of all to us.' None of the comparisons to other writers seem right. Bernhard? Too aggressive. Beckett? Too controlling. Ibsen? 'He is the most destructive writer I know,' Fosse claims. 'I feel that there’s a kind of—I don’t know if it’s a good English word—but a kind of reconciliation in my writing. Or, to use the Catholic or Christian word, peace.’“—Merve Emre, The New Yorker
“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
