Septology WINNER OF THE 2023 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

Jon Fosse is a major European writer. Karl Ove Knausgaard Fosse has written a strange mystical moebius strip of a novel, in which an artist struggles with faith and loneliness, and watches himself, or versions of himself, fall away into the lower depths. The social world seems distant and foggy in this profound, existential narrative. Hari Kunzru, author of White Tears 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, New York Review of Books Septology feels momentous. Catherine Taylor, Guardian Having read the Norwegian writer Jon Fosses Septology, an extraordinary seven-novel sequence about an old mans recursive reckoning with the braided realities of God, art, identity, family life and human life itself, Ive come into awe and reverence myself for idiosyncratic forms of immense metaphysical fortitude. Randy Boyagoda, New York Times Time soon loses its meaning, or at least some of its hold over us. Picking up Septology after a while is like slipping back into a gently flowing river, your body buoyed by the current of ands, yess and I thinks. Memories, everyday observations, prayer, spectres of lives not lived these all bleed into one seamless wholeThe effect is subtle and cumulative. Any attempt to isolate and analyse it collapses its magic, like a kind of literary quantum phenomenon. Frazer McDiarmid, Oxford Review of Books The narrative keeps circling, inching slowly, as interior monologues sometimes do, and the way a painting might gradually appear from a cumulation of small brushstrokes.The effect is meditative, devotional, like the rhythm of the Christian liturgyThe reader may sometimes feel weary with the amount of words here too. But there is generosity. And persistence, like in the rituals of worship and devotion, is rewarded. Nick Mattiske, Insights

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, childrens books, and over forty plays, with more than a thousand productions performed and translations into fifty languages. Septology is his latest prose work, published in one volume by Fitzcarraldo Editions for the first time.