A New Name: Septology VI-VII
ノルウェーの海辺で暮らす画家アスレと、もう一人のアスレの記憶が交錯する終章。信仰、愛、芸術、時間の感覚を、ゆるやかで催眠的な文体でたどる。
作品情報
二人のアスレが、人生と信仰の境界をゆっくりとたどる。
Septology の最終巻として、アスレの内省と回想が重なりながら、日々の生活と霊的な問いが静かに広がっていく。反復と変奏を生かした文体が、時間そのものを読む体験に変える。
書籍情報
- 出版社
- Fitzcarraldo Editions
- 発売日
- 2022-06-06
- ページ数
- 224ページ
- 言語
- 英語
- サイズ
- 11.4 x 1.19 x 19.71 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781804270219
- ISBN-10
- 1804270210
- カテゴリ
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Contemporary
Asle is an ageing painter and widower who lives alone on the southwest coast of Norway. In nearby Bjørgvin another Asle, also a painter, is lying in the hospital, consumed by alcoholism. 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 ), we follow the lives of the two Asles as younger adults in flashbacks: the narrator meets his lifelong love, Ales; joins the Catholic Church; and makes a living by trying to paint away all the pictures stuck in his mind. 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 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, with more than a thousand productions performed and translations into fifty languages. A New Name is the final volume in Septology , his latest prose work, published in three volumes by Fitzcarraldo Editions. Damion Searls is a translator from German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch and a writer in English. He has translated seven books and a libretto by Jon Fosse – Melancholy (co-translated with Grethe Kvernes), Aliss at the Fire , Morning and Evening (novel and libretto), Scenes from a Childhood , The Other Name: Septology I-II , I is Another: Septology III-V and A New Name: Septology VI-VII – and books by many other classic modern writers.
レビュー
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The Humble Mystic
Septology has been an immersion into the mind of a humble mystic. There are very few books that I have read over my lifetime, that I can say improved me. This was one of those books. Throughout the seven day journey into the mind of the book’s narrator, a widowed painter named Asle, I found myself again and again awestruck by the balance Fosse strikes between what is unsayable and universal. The simplicity of language and repetitions created a hypnotic effect on my mind as I was carried into Asle’s reflections on the past and the present, on love and loss, on art and faith. It is a book that is both earthy and mystical, both lonely and communal. What makes the book work so well, is the way that Fosse, reflects and ponders the interconnectedness of things seen and unseen, spoken and unspoken, without ever being preachy or heavy-handed. The author achieves this through the self doubting and honesty of the narrators thoughts. It never once felt like there was an agenda, and yet, it has so much to say about the things that truly matter. I finished the last page and thought if I would be willing to enter the same kind of stillness Asle embodies, the same stillness Fosse seems to live and write from, and humbly accepted the mystery of it all, maybe just maybe, I too could find the pinpoints of Grace in it all.
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I love Jo Fosse's writing style
Great reading experience
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The latest & most mature work by this 2023 Nobel Prize winner - a unique and wonderful novel
I intend to reread Septology. It’s that good and that that mysterious- In a spiritual sense. In it the main character looks back on life. On suffering. On love. On art and life. I was unaware of this author, even though I read many novels in translation, until he won the Nobel Prize. I was so struck by what I read about him and this, his latest work, that I immediately downloaded the first two parts as e-books and ordered the third part in paperback (which arrived just as I finished the e-books). Though printed in 3 volumes, the work is divided into 7 parts, each one recounting a day only, constituting a whole week of consecutive days. There is a spiritual underpinning to the whole work and I suspect the one week of 7 days is meant to remind us of the 7 days of creation, the first chapter of Genesis. I recommend this so highly I intend to reread it soon.
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Magical
Magical. Men especially should like this book. It is on my book shelf next to Dag Solstad
関連する文学賞
- ナショナル・ブック賞（翻訳文学） 第5回（2022年） ・Nominee