A NEW NAME

Winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize in LiteratureAsle is an ageing painter and widower who lives alone on the southwest coast of Norway. In nearby Bj`rgvin another Asle, also a painter, is lying in the hospital, consumed by alcoholism. Asle and Asle are doppelgńngers ` 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 bytrying to paint away all the pictures stuck in his mind. A New Name: Septology VI-VII is a transcendent explorationof the human condition, and a radically other reading experience ` incantatory, hypnotic, and utterly unique.`Fosse`s portrait of memory remarkably refuses. It will not be other than: indellible as paint, trivial as nail clippings, wound like damp string. This book reaches out of its frame like a hand.`` Jesse Ball, author of Census`Jon Fosse is a major European writer.`` Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of My Struggle