Synopses & Reviews
The lives of an aging painter and his doppelganger converge and diverge in an elegiac meditation on our unlived lives, in the second book of the celebrated Norwegian writer’s three-volume Septology.
I is Another follows the lives of two men living close to each other on the west coast of Norway. The year is coming to a close and Asle, an aging painter and widower, is reminiscing about his life. He lives alone, his only friends being his neighbor, Åsleik, a bachelor and traditional Norwegian fisherman-farmer, and Beyer, a gallerist who lives in Bjørgvin, a couple hours’ drive south of Dylgja, where he lives. There, in Bjørgvin, lives another Asle, also a painter. He and the narrator are doppelgangers — two versions of the same person, two versions of the same life. I is Another calls into question concrete notions around subjectivity and the self. What makes us who we are? And why do we lead one life and not another?
Review
“The first two installments of Fosse’s wondrous septology sustain a riveting stream of consciousness in a single rhythmic sentence... Fosse’s portrait of intersecting lives is that rare metaphysical novel that readers will find compulsively readable.” Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Review
"Fosse is often mentioned as a leading contender for the Nobel Prize in literature. The present book has a fittingly Joycean sweep... that establishes him as a contender." Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Review
“Fosse’s fusing of the commonplace and the existential, together with his dramatic forays into the past, make for a relentlessly consuming work: already Septology feels momentous.” The Guardian
About the Author
Jon Fosse is one of Norway’s most celebrated authors and playwrights. He 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, children’s books, and over forty plays, with more than a thousand productions performed and translations into fifty languages.
Damion Searls is a translator from German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch and a writer in English. He has translated many classic modern writers, including Proust, Rilke, Nietzsche, Walser, Ingeborg Bachmann, Alfred Döblin, Jon Fosse, Elfriede Jelinek, and Nescio.