The Other Name (2019)by Jon Fosse

 Book Review

The Other Name (2019)

by Jon Fosse

  I guess one of the advantages to awarding the Nobel Prize is you can give it to your homeboys- like how Norwegian author/playwright Jon Fosse, who won in 2023.  Fosse is just about as un-hip a choice for the Nobel as you could possibly imagine.  True, his prose tends to be stream-of-consciousness style and his plots convoluted BUT he also writes incessantly about God and about characters who are broken and isolated from the world.

  Like many(few?), his Nobel win last year was a cue to actually tackle some of his books, so I started with the Audiobook of The Other Name which are parts I and II of his six volume Septology.  Septology is about a pair of Norwegian painters- both named Asle. One is an alcoholic drinking himself to death, the other is newly-ish sober and a convert to Catholicism.  Excited yet?

 I was glad to be tackling the Audiobook instead of the book- book- seems like the actual book would have been intolerable.