TRANSIT BOOKS SPRING SUMMER 2020 SEPTOLOGY The 1,250-page magnum opus from one of the most important writers of our time. Born in 1959 in Strandebarm, in Vestland, western Norway, Jon Fosse’s remarkably prolific career began in 1983 with his first novel, Red, Black, and since then he has published numerous novels, stories, books of poetry, children’s books, and essay collections. He began writing plays in 1993, with Someone Is Going to Come, and since then he has written almost thirty plays, including A Summer’s Day, Dream of Autumn, Death Variations, Sleep, and I Am the Wind. Since the mid-nineties his plays have had unparalleled international success, being performed over a thousand times all over the world; his works have been translated into more than fifty languages. Today Fosse is one of the most performed living playwrights, but he has continued to write novels, stories, and poetry of exceptional quality. In 2015 he received the Nordic Council Literature Prize for his work Trilogy, consisting of Wakefulness, Olav’s Dreams, and Weariness. Fosse’s earlier novels Melancholy I and II, Morning and Evening, and Aliss at the Fire have also received wide critical acclaim. Fosse has been awarded numerous prizes both in Norway and abroad, and in recent years he has often been mentioned as a frontrunner for the Nobel Prize in Literature. The three books that comprise his magnum opus, Septology, will be published by Transit Books, beginning with The Other Jon Fosse Name (tr. Damion Searls) in April 2020. Photograph of the author © Tom Kolstad/Samlaget THE OTHER NAME: SEPTOLOGY I-II from Jon Fosse THE OTHER NAME TRANSLATED FROM THE NORWEGIAN BY nd I see myself standing and look- Damion Searls Aing at the picture with the two lines that cross in the middle, one pur- ple line, one brown line, it’s a painting The Other Name follows the lives of two men living close to each other on the wider than it is high and I see that I’ve west coast of Norway. The year is coming to a close and Asle, an aging painter painted the lines slowly, the paint is and widower, is reminiscing about his life. He lives alone, his only friends thick, two long wide lines, and they’ve being his neighbor, Åsleik, a bachelor and traditional Norwegian fisherman- dripped, where the brown line and pur- farmer, and Beyer, a gallerist who lives in Bjørgvin, a couple hours’ drive south ple line cross the colors blend beautiful- of Dylgja, where he lives. There, in Bjørgvin, lives another Asle, also a painter. ly and drip and I’m thinking this isn’t a He and the narrator are doppelgangers—two versions of the same person, two picture but suddenly the picture is the versions of the same life. way it’s supposed to be, it’s done, there’s nothing more to do on it, I think, it’s Written in hypnotic prose that shifts between the first and third person, The time to put it away, I don’t want to Other Name calls into question concrete notions around subjectivity and the stand here at the easel anymore, I don’t self. What makes us who we are? And why do we lead one life and not another? want to look at it anymore, I think, and Through flashbacks, Fosse deftly explores the convergences and divergences in I think today’s Monday and I think I the lives of both Asles, slowly building towards a decisive encounter between April 7, 2020 have to put this picture away with the them both. A writer at the zenith of his career, with The Other Name, the first Fiction/Literary other ones I’m working on but am not two volumes in his Septology, Fosse presents us with an indelible and poignant 5.25 x 8, 340 pages, $17.95 done with, the canvases on stretchers Rights: North America exploration of the human condition that will endure as his masterpiece. leaning against the wall between the Agent: Gina Winje Agency 978-1-945492-40-2 (pb) bedroom door and the hall door under “Fosse has written a strange mystical moebius strip of a novel, in which an artist the hook with the brown leather shoul- struggles with faith and loneliness, and watches himself, or versions of himself, derbag on it, the bag where I keep my fall away into the lower depths. The social world seems distant and foggy in this sketchpad and pencil, and then I look profound, existential narrative, which is only the first part of what promises to be at the two stacks of finished paintings a major work of Scandinavian fiction.”—Hari Kunzru, author of White Tears propped against the wall next to the kitchen door, I already have ten or so big paintings finished plus four or five small ones, something like that, four- JON FOSSE is one of Norway’s most celebrated teen paintings in all in two stacks next authors and playwrights. Since his 1983 fiction debut, to each other by the kitchen door, since Fosse has written prose, poetry, essays, short stories, I’m about to have a show, most of the children’s books, and over forty plays, with more than a paintings are approximately square, as thousand productions performed and translations into they put it, I think, but sometimes I fifty languages. also paint long narrow ones and the one with the two lines crossing is noticeably DAMION SEARLS is a translator from German, “JON FOSSE IS A MAJOR oblong, as they put it, but I don’t want Norwegian, French, and Dutch and a writer in to put this one into the show because English. He has translated many classic modern EUROPEAN WRITER.” I don’t like it much, maybe all things writers, including Proust, Rilke, Nietzsche, Walser, and considered it’s not really a painting... © Tom Kolstad/Samlaget Ingeborg Bachmann. KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD THE TREE AND THE VINE from Dola de Jong THE TREE AND THE VINE TRANSLATED FROM THE DUTCH BY Kristen Gehrman met Erica in 1938 at the home of a I mutual acquaintance, a superficial A new translation of the 1955 classic about repressed queer desire, acquaintance, as far as I was concerned, set against the rising threat of WWII. and not someone I wanted to invest a lot of time in. Wies and I had spent six weeks lying next to each other in When Bea meets Erica at the home of a mutual friend, this chance encounter a hospital room, and our time togeth- sets the stage for the story of two women torn between desire and taboo in er didn’t inspire me to get to know her the years leading up to the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam. Erica, a reckless any better. After a month and a half, I’d young journalist, pursues passionate but abusive affairs with different women. had my fill. Wies is the type of wom- Bea, a reserved secretary, grows increasingly obsessed with Erica, yet denial an who, once she gets another woman and shame keep her from recognizing her attraction. Only Bea’s discovery to herself, casts out a net of feminine that Erica is half-Jewish and a member of the Dutch resistance—and thus in solidarity, and the only way to escape danger—brings her closer to accepting her own feelings. is to run away as fast as you can, but that wasn’t an option for me at the time. First published in 1955 in the Netherlands, Dola de Jong’s The Tree and the She had thick skin, typical of her kind, Vine was a groundbreaking work in its time for its frank and sensitive depic- May 19, 2020 and my lack of enthusiasm and feigned tion of the love between two women, now available in a new translation. Fiction/Literary 5.25 x 8, 160 pages, $15.95 drowsiness only seemed to make her Rights: World English want to confide in me even more. Af- “De Jong makes her narrator a real person, the plain woman over thirty, who does Agent: Uitgeverij Cossee ter being released from the hospital two not want to recognize her nature and has brief, dutiful, joyless affairs with men. 978-1-945492-34-1 (pb) weeks before I was, she visited me often Therefore, she is always lonely; her little affections and pleasures will never change and brought me all kinds of flowers and that. She is not aware of the barrenness of her existence. This silence, this refusal treats. to see, is very touching, and is delicately rendered.”—V.S. Naipaul, Winner of I felt like I couldn’t completely ig- the Nobel Prize in Literature nore her after that, so every now and then I made a point to accept one of her many invitations. I had an aversion DOLA DE JONG (1911–2003) was born Dorothea “A COMPELLING LITTLE to offending people back then, not that Rosalie de Jong in Anhern, The Netherlands. She BOOK, BEAUTIFUL I can blame myself for it anymore—it worked as a dancer and a reporter before she fled the was at her house that I met Erica. It was country in 1940. Settling first with her husband in AND SENSITIVE. IT IS a warm summer evening, and I decid- Tangiers, she immigrated to the United States. She was ed to ride my bicycle over to Wies’s to the author of sixteen books for adults and children, SOMETHING ONE MUST pay my obligatory visit. To be honest, I including The Tree and the Vine and The Field, which READ AT A SINGLE was hoping she wouldn’t be home, that won the City of Amsterdam Literature Prize in 1947.