A New Name Shortlisted for the National Book Award for Translated Literature
We're excited to share that A New Name by Jon Fosse, translated from the Norwegian by Damion Searls, has been named a finalist for the 2022 National Book Award for Translated Literature. The winner will be announced at the 73rd National Book Awards Ceremony & Benefit Dinner on Wednesday, November 16.
The other shortlisted titles are Scholastique Mukasonga's Kibogo (tr. Mark Polizzotti); Mónica Ojeda's Jawbone (tr. Sarah Booker); Samanta Schweblin's Seven Empty Houses (tr. Megan McDowell); and Yoko Tawada's Scattered All Over the Earth (tr. Margaret Mitsutani).
Also a finalist for the 2022 International Booker Prize, A New Name is the final installment in Fosse's three-volume Septology, receiving reviews in The New York Times, Harper's, The New York Review of Books, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, and elsewhere.
Jon and Damion spoke to Words Without Borders on the occasion, reflecting on the art of translation and their long-standing relationship.
About A New Name
Asle is an aging painter and widower who lives alone on the west coast of Norway. His only friends are his neighbor, Åsleik, a traditional fisherman-farmer, and Beyer, a gallerist who lives in the city. There, in Bjørgvin, lives another Asle, also a painter but lonely and consumed by alcohol. Asle and Asle are doppelgängers—two versions of the same person, two versions of the same life.
In this final installment of Jon Fosse’s Septology, “a major work of Scandinavian fiction” (Hari Kunzru), we follow the lives of the two Asles as younger adults in flashbacks: the narrator meets his lifelong love, Ales; joins the Catholic Church; and makes a living by trying to paint away all the pictures stuck in his mind. A New Name: Septology VI-VII is a transcendent exploration of the human condition, and a radically other reading experience—incantatory, hypnotic, and utterly unique.
"An extraordinary seven-novel sequence about an old man’s recursive reckoning with the braided realities of God, art, identity, family life and human life itself… The books feel like the culminating project of an already major career."—Randy Boyagoda, The New York Times
