World Literary Awards

← Back to awarded works
Septology

Nobel Prize in Literature

Septology

Jon Olav Fosse

This three-part novel follows painter Asle as memory, faith, loneliness, and loss slowly fold into one another in an almost unbroken flow of language. Its repetitions and silences draw the reader into a deeply interior meditation on existence and redemption.

memoryfaithsolituderepetitionredemption

Work Information

Its long, flowing sentences turn memory and prayer into one continuous experience.

Asle and another Asle echo each other across a coastal landscape shaped by memory and faith. Across its seven-part design, the novel turns everyday gestures into a meditation on the weight of life and its quiet mystery.

Book Information

Publisher
Fitzcarraldo Editions
Published
2022-11-02
Pages
825 pages
Language
英語
Size
19.7 x 3.7 x 11.2 cm
ISBN-13
9781804270066
ISBN-10
1804270067
Price
3992 JPY
Category
洋書/Mystery & Thrillers/Thrillers/Psychological & Suspense

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. Septology is a transcendent exploration of the human condition by Jon Fosse, the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate, and a radically other reading experience – incantatory, hypnotic and utterly unique.

Jon Fosse was born in 1959 on the west coast of Norway and is the recipient of countless prestigious prizes, both in his native Norway and abroad. Since his 1983 fiction debut, Raudt, svart [Red, Black], Fosse has written prose, poetry, essays, short stories, children’s books and over forty plays. In 2023, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable’. Damion Searls is a translator from German, Norwegian, French and Dutch, and a writer in English. He has translated nine books by Jon Fosse, including the three books of Septology .

Reviews

  • What a stunning, unique novel. Reading these stream-of-consciousness volumes felt like entering a dream-world for two weeks - divine, white, devastating, hypnotic. Jon Fosse has created something remarkle, dare I say it: transcendent. His writing goes “beyond,” taking the readers to a place without words or borders, outside of time; somehow within the everyday and startlingly beyond it. I felt this book in my bones and will carry the feeling that reading it gave me for a long time.

  • Un libro para todo el mundo

  • Produkt zgodny z opisem

  • great book

  • A great book

Related Literary Awards