On 5 October 2023 Jon Fosse was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable”. This review of his seven-volume novel “Septology” was originally published on 15 January 2023.
A giant of Norwegian letters and an internationally celebrated dramatist, Jon Fosse, whose body of work spans four decades, has until recently remained little-known in the English-speaking world. But with his latest work, Septology – a seven-part novel published simultaneously in an English translation by Damion Searls, initially in three instalments and this winter brought together in a single, thick volume – Fosse’s renown among Anglophone readers seems on the cusp of being lastingly assured.
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