The Other Name: Septology I-II by Jon Fosse
Damion Searls, Jon Fosse’s translator from Norwegian to English, said once that he learned Norwegian to read Jon Fosse. Fosse, is one of the most performed European playwright today; it has had 900 productions in more than 40 languages, staged all over the world, but not in the U.K. It is something worth reflecting on.
The first of Fosse’s book that I read was the Morning and Evening. It was a breathtaking read. Then the wonderful Fitzcarraldo editions published the Scenes from a Childhood and in 2019 The Other Name: Septology I-II, all translated by Damion Searls who deserves high praise for the remarkable translations. Jon Fosse is not an easy writer; to replicate his dense, poetic prose requires skill, knowledge and an extraordinary amount of work.
It is one easy to catch the rhythm of the language in Fosse’s books. I found that I like reading his books aloud; the experience resembles that of meditation. It requires deep focus to follow the dense, poetic form and the pages-long sentences. The repetition makes the reading hypnotic and haunting. It brims with melancholy and emotion. It’s beautiful.
Two older men, both painters. Both called Asle. They both live on the south-west coast of Norway. One lives in the city of Bjørgvin, which appears to be Bergen, the other in a remote small place called Dylgja. The first one is an alcoholic, twice divorced and estranged from his three children. He lives alone in an apartment with his dog. The second one is a widow, childless. He also lives a solitary live, his only companion is a fisherman who has a small farm nearby. He gave up drinking and smoking years before and recently he has converted to Catholicism. The two Alses are doppelgangers, they are two versions of the same person, two versions of the same life, both grappling with existential questions about life, death, love, light and shadow, faith and hopefulness.
The Other Name is an extraordinary existential narrative, almost mystical and utterly compelling.
Below a passage from the book.
…….. yes, I can stay there for a long time, I don’t know how long, and I try to see why actually keep painting pictures and I sit and silently fall deeper and deeper into what I’m seeing, into what’s bigger than life, maybe, but that’s not the right way to say it, because what it is, yes, a kind of light, a kind of shining darkness, an invisible light in these pictures that speak in silence, and that speaks the truth, and then once I’ve entered into this vision, or way of seeing, so that it’s not me who’s seeing but something else seeing through me, sort of, then I always find a way I can get further with a picture I’m struggling with, and that’s how it also is with all the paintings by other people that mean anything to me, it’s like it’s not the painter, and it’s like this something is trapped in the picture and speaks silently from it, and it might be one single brushstroke that makes the picture able to speak like that, and it’s impossible to understand, I think, and I think, it’s the same with the writing I like to read, what matters isn’t what is literally says about this or that, it’s something else, something that silently speaks in and behind the lines and sentences, but, yes this is what happened,……..
Jon Fosse, The Other Name: Septology I-II