1 April 2020
Jon Fosse’s The Other Name describes two consecutive days in the life of its narrator Asle, a painter and widower who lives alone in a remote house in Dylgja. Another identical Asle, also a painter, lives in the nearby town of Bjørgvin. Fosse’s book moves quietly between these two men, two versions of the same person, on different paths.
I
No one saw the avalanche because it all fell apart so slowly. Not day by day, not even hour by hour, or minute by minute, but it fell apart. It was falling apart the whole time, and it was an avalanche. It had to be an avalanche, because what else could it be?
The novel Vaim is the first book to be published by Jon Fosse after receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2023. It will be launched in connection with the opening of DIFF 2025.
I was standing outside The Vaim General Store with this fishing set in my hand, and I thought why in the world had I bought myself a fishing rod, no, it had never once crossed my mind to buy fishing gear, because what was I supposed to do with it, it’s true I had liked fishing when I was a boy, but, yes, that was quite a long time ago, still for all I knew it might be fun to stand there on The Quay and cast out the line and reel it in again, maybe, I thought and either way The Shopkeeper was a very good salesman, that was for sure, once you walk through the door of his shop there’s no getting away from him, yes, I thought, and what now, well I’d been thinking I would go to the restaurant, to get dinner, yes because it had been several days since I’d had good hot food, so it would taste good, I thought, and besides I was probably pretty curious to see what it was like in that restaurant, but was I actually allowed to go in there carrying this fishing gear, because I didn’t want to go back up to my room with it, because who knows, maybe I’d run into The Hotel Owner again, maybe with all Brita’s nosiness she’s gone up to my room again to see what I have in my suitcases, yes, she probably has, definitely, since I had nothing to hide she could look at every last thing in there if it made her happy, as far as I was concerned, but it was a bit ridiculous, that Brita woman wasn’t entirely on the level, I thought and I noticed that I had started walking down towards The Quay, not that I wanted to go fishing now, but sooner or later I’d have to try my hand at casting a line or two, I thought, but for now I just wanted go down to The Quay to look around before I went into the restaurant, Vaim Restaurant yes, I thought and I stopped and stood there and looked at the boat tied up there on The Quay, and it was a beautiful boat, big for the kind of boat it was, and the roof extended to almost cover the whole boat, and that was probably just as well, since it rained so much in this part of the country, and the boat was nicely lacquered, yes, the varnish was so shiny that it glittered, yes that boat was a sight to see, and the name it had, Eline, that was a beautiful name, I felt, but now it really was probably time to get some food in me, yes, I thought and then I cut across the parking lot towards the door with Vaim Restaurant painted on it and I opened the door and I could see it was bright and cozy in the restaurant, and a guy was sitting at a table in the far corner of the restaurant, about my age, he had a beer bottle and a glass on the table in front of him and he sat there staring into space, and he didn’t notice that someone had come into the restaurant, he just sat there staring into space like before, there weren’t that many tables in the restaurant, but they were nice old wooden tables, and there were wooden chairs like the one I had in my room around the tables, four wooden chairs for each table, and then on the left there was a counter with a cash register and the menu was written on a kind of blackboard on the wall behind the counter, and there were three dishes to choose from, meatballs, fishcakes, and stew, and below that it said that dessert was fruit cocktail with ice cream and that was it, and then there on the counter there was indeed a sheep bell, just like Brita had said and I went and leaned the fishing set against the wall behind the nearest table, the one closest to the door, and so the farthest away from the man sitting drinking a beer and staring straight ahead, and then I went over to the counter and picked up the sheep bell and shook it, and damn it made a loud sound, so I quickly put it back down on the counter, and the man sitting there with his glass of beer was still only staring straight ahead, yes yes, I thought and I guessed I had to just stand there at the counter and wait, I thought and all of this taken together really was a bit strange, I thought, The Vaim Hotel and The Vaim Restaurant and The Vaim General Store, yes, everything was kind of odd, and I wasn’t so sure whether I liked it or not, no, there was almost something unreal about it all, I thought, and my car, I saw it when I left the store, didn’t I, no, maybe not and I think I should go look out the door to see if it’s there, and I go to the door and I open it, go outside, and yes, well, the car is right where I parked it, so as I can see everything’s fine, I think and I go over to the car and I think that I should check to make sure the doors are locked and they are, every door, and so I should probably go back to the restaurant then, because somebody who can serve me probably has to come soon, I think and I go back into the restaurant and as soon as I’m through the door I see Brita standing there holding up the fishing set and she looks at me
Original title: Vaim Hotell
Publisher: Samlaget, 2026
Genre: Novel
Hotel is the second of three books about the fictional small town of Vaim, each with different characters.
It is a strange story about The Guest and a hotel owner named Brita. The Guest checks into the empty Vaim Hotel, where the commanding and powerful owner Brita holds sway in partnership with The Businessman. The Guest is tricked and lied to and goes from being a guest to working for Brita.
To be published in 2026.
The Other Name: Septology I-II
by Jon Fosse
tr. Damion Searls
(Fitzcarraldo, Oct. 2019; Transit, April 2020)
Reviewed by Spencer Ruchti
Not long into Part I of Jon Fosse’s Septology, the narrator, Asle, confesses to speaking with the dead. His young wife, Ales, has killed herself; this suicide becomes the mournful obsession of Fosse’s seven-part novel. “There’s no big difference or distance between life and death, between the living and the dead, even though the difference can seem insurmountable it isn’t,” Asle thinks. In the four decades following the publication of his first book, Raudt, svart, Jon Fosse has written repeatedly on suicide, melancholy, excruciating loss, the role or absence of God, and the border between this life and whatever follows. To read his enormous body of work in panorama is to see the frequent exchanges between the living and the dead, but also beautiful white visions as the curtain draws shut. “The whole of Septology is possibly just an instant, a loaded one, a moment of death. When a person dies it is said that one sees life repeated. Septology can maybe read as such a moment,” Fosse has said in an interview with his Norwegian editor Cecilie Seiness. This “instantaneous” novel of moments is also the longest Fosse ever written. One can’t help but assign it the reverence of a denouement as the author approaches the twilight of his career.
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| Jo Nesbø |
The Norwegian crime writer talks about his early influences, changing tastes and the age-limit for enjoying Hemingway
My favourite book growing up
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. My father grew up in New York; I guess that’s why there were a lot of American books in our house. These two by Mark Twain were food for the imagination for a kid like me. The Huck book was my first road novel, Tom Sawyer my first murder mystery.
The book that changed me as a teenager
The Thief’s Journal, Jean Genet’s classic novel about life and exploitation as a gay man living on the margins in 1930s Europe, changed my view on what literature can and should deal with. At that age, I found it tough reading because the mental landscape of the main character was repellent to me. Not his sexual orientation, but because he found some kind of pleasure in being treated badly. I couldn’t grasp that. And that was probably what drew me to the novel.
The book that made me want to be a writer
Both On the Road by Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski’s Ham on Rye were important. I do think writing is a result of reading, like making music is a result of listening to music. That it’s mainly a social reflex, like stories being told around a dinner table; somebody has contributed a story, now it’s your turn.
The book I could never read again
I was a big fan of Ernest Hemingway. Recently I started rereading (which I very seldom do) a novel of his, and realised it felt dated. I don’t know if it’s because Hemingway, like Raymond Chandler, has influenced so many writers that they now can come across as almost comic copies. When I mentioned my disappointment, my 25-years-younger editor said, with a world-weary sigh: “But, you know, Hemingway is a young man’s writer.”
The book I discovered later in life
Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March. I was recently going through the books I’ve inherited from my parents. It follows three generations of a family, with the breakdown of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy as a backdrop, and it’s a gem of a novel. It has this sense of time and place that I know is impossible to construct – it has to already be there within the writer. It’s sad, it’s epic and it has a tragic gravity to it that brings a lump to my throat: the fact that you can’t go back, that the past – not the future – is the promised garden.
The author I came back to
Well, Henrik Ibsen was mandatory reading when you went to school in Norway, and at that young age he felt old and boring. It was only later, when I was living a life where I could relate, that I started reading him. I went on to read all of his plays, every one of them, and realised what a great entertainer he is.
The book I am currently reading
The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. Haidt has a background in social anthropology and psychology and it’s a convincing argument on how morality has evolved and on how it divides us in politics and social behaviour, enlightening when it comes to understanding why some Americans vote Republican in spite of being decent, intelligent human beings. Like David Hume said, reason is the slave of emotions. We use our intellect to find confirmation that what we feel and want to be true is actually the truth. Confirmation bias may carry us from our childhood to our grave, without ever feeling we were proved wrong. That goes for “them” and for me and you, Guardian readers.
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THE BOOKS OF MY LIFE
2021
The books of my life / Amanda Gorman / ‘I wanted my words to re-sanctify the steps of the Capitol’Mary Beard / ‘Virgil was a radical rap artist of the first century BC’
Gabriel Byrne: ‘I’ve never played Hamlet, but in many ways I am him’Stephen King: ‘I loved Lord of the Flies the way kids love Harry Potter’
Curtis Sittenfeld / ‘Sweet Valley High is not respected – but I found the books riveting’
Elif Shafak / ‘Reading Orlando was like plunging into a cold but beautifully blue sea’
Jason Reynolds / “Reading rap lyrics made me realise that poetry could be for me”
Michael Rosen / ‘My comfort read? Great Expectations’
Siri Hustvedt / ‘I responded viscerally to De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex’
Alan Garner / ‘The Chronicles of Narnia are atrociously written’
Rose Tremain / ‘My comfort reads are MasterChef cookbooks’
Oliver Jeffers / ‘Catch-22 was the first time I had a physical reaction to a book’
Penelope Lively / ‘Beatrix Potter seemed so exotic, unlike my world of palm trees’
2022
David Baddiel / The book that changed me? John Berger’s Ways of Seeing
Edmund White / ‘My earliest reading memory is a lady toad with a nasty temper’
David Mitchell / ‘If I need cheering up, Jamie Oliver’s recipes usually help’
Isabel Allende / ‘I have been displaced most of my life’
Nikesh Shula /
Olivia Laing /
Viet Thanh Nguyen /
Madeline Miller /
Barbara Trapido /
Monica Ali /
Sebastian Barry /
Hanif Kureishi /
Neil Gaiman /
Lee Child /
PAGE 7
Meg Mason /
Esther Freud /
Maggie Shipstead /
Ian Rankin /
Julian Barnes /
Sadie Jones /
Tahmima Anam /
Tess Gerritsen /
Abdulrazah Gurnak /
Susie Boyt /
Sara Paretsky /
Sebastian Faulks /
Karen Joy Fowler /
Eimear McBride /
Sam Byers /
Denise Mina /
Adam Kay /
Barbara Kingsolver / ‘Middlemarch is about everything, for every person, at every age’
Kit de Waal /
Sunjeev Sahota /
PAGE 6
Shehan Karunatilaka /
Michael Morpurgo /
Michelle Zauner /
Amy Blum /
Philip Pullman /
2023
Alex Wheatle /
Colin Thubron /
Audrey Maggee /
Joseph O'Connor /
Ned Beauman /
Kevin Jared Hosein /
Carlo Roveli /
Benjamin Myers /
Charlotte Mendelson /
Warsan Shire /
Katherine Rundel /
Louise Kennedy /
Colson Whitehead /
Han Kang /
Dreda Say Mitchell /
PAGE 5
Jessie Burton /
Kamila Shamsie /
Jenny Erpenbeck /
Gary Shteyngart
Attica Locke /
Lauren Groff / ‘Virginia Woolf’s Flush is delightfully bananas’
Paul Lynch /
John Niven /
PAGE 4
Natalie Haynes / ‘I couldn’t stop reading Stephen King - even at the top of the Eiffel Tower’
Richard Armitage / ‘I used to stand on the Lord of the Rings to reach the top shelf in my wardrobe’
Dolly Alderton /
Jonathan Escoffery /
Joanne Harris /
Hernan Diaz /
Irenosen Okojie /
Bob Mortimer /
Francis Spufford /
2024
Mieko Kawakami / “Franz Kafka es mi lectura reconfortante”
2025
Niall Williams / ‘When I first read Chekhov, I thought: “He’s not so great”’
Graham Norton / ‘The Bell Jar changed how I felt about books’
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| Jon Fosse |
A BOOK OF THE DAY
The new Nobel laureate’s latest novella is a shimmering fable about a man lost in a dark forest
Lauren Groff
Saturday 18 November 2023
O
With his wildly popular autobiographical series My Struggle, the author breaks down the banal
Emily M. Keeler
October 24, 2014
“It doesn’t feel like a memoir to me, partly because it doesn’t reveal enough stories from my life,” Karl Ove Knausgård says over the phone. Considering how it clocks in at close to 4,000 pages in total, it’s hard to imagine that Knausgård has left anything out of My Struggle, his profoundly autobiographical novel that spans six volumes. “It’s much more like the process of a novel,” he says, “much more like an existential search for something.” Five years after the first book of the series was published in Scandinavia, Knausgård’s search continues.
