Publishers Weekly
01/10/2022
In the beautiful and unsettling final volume of Fosse’s Septology (after I Is Another), the author increasingly complicates the reader’s understanding of a painter named Asle. As in previous volumes, the perspective switches between Asle’s first-person narration and a close third, with the arc here consisting of Asle’s reminiscences about love and church as he wraps up some business with his gallery so he can join his friend Åsleik and Åsleik’s sister Guro for Christmas. With the two viewpoints, Fosse continues to toy with the suggestion that these are two separate men named Asle who have led almost identical lives, with minor differences. Guro is also twinned—one version has her living in town, another in the country, but in both, the character’s looks and disposition are similar. This haunting tale holds an intriguing puzzle at its heart: can existence only be understood as a kind of paradox? Fosse infuses the mystery with Asle’s frequent paraphrasing of the German Catholic theologian Meister Eckhart (“God becomes God in the soul and the soul becomes the soul in God”), bringing insight to questions of love, art, and faith. This offers a stirring exploration of life and identity. Agent: Gina Winje, Gina Winje Agency. (Mar.)
From the Publisher
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
"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
“The first two installments of Fosse’s wondrous septology sustain a riveting stream of consciousness in a single rhythmic sentence... Fosse’s portrait of intersecting lives is that rare metaphysical novel that readers will find compulsively readable.”—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
"Fosse is often mentioned as a leading contender for the Nobel Prize in literature. The present book has a fittingly Joycean sweep . . . that establishes him as a contender."—Kirkus Reviews, 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
