Read and discuss literature with our Nordic Book Club Online! Each month we select a novel from some of the best Nordic literary voices to read and discuss via Zoom. On April 9, in celebration of Norwegian author Jon Fosse’s recent award of the 2023 Nobel Prize for Literature, we’ll be reading the first two volumes of his acclaimed Septology series, a radical and transcendental exploration of the human condition as told through the story of two aging painters each called Asle — one a widower on the southwest coast of Norway, and one a struggling alcoholic in the city of Bjørgvin — as they confront eternal questions of death, love, faith, and hopelessness. All seven volumes of Septology are available in collection here in translation by Damion Searls; today’s discussion will focus on Volumes I & II, published under the title The Other Name.

The Other Name follows the lives of two men living close to each other on the west coast of Norway. The year is coming to a close and Asle, an aging painter and widower, is reminiscing about his life. He lives alone, his only friends being his neighbor, Åsleik, a bachelor and traditional Norwegian fisherman-farmer, and Beyer, a gallerist who lives in Bjørgvin, a couple hours’ drive south of Dylgja, where he lives. There, in Bjørgvin, lives another Asle, also a painter. He and the narrator are doppelgangers—two versions of the same person, two versions of the same life.

Written in hypnotic prose that shifts between the first and third person, The Other Name calls into question concrete notions around subjectivity and the self. What makes us who we are? And why do we lead one life and not another?

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