A Silent Language: The Nobel Lecture

PRAISE FOR JON FOSSE

"Septology is the only novel I have read that has made me believe in the reality of the divine, as the fourteenth-century theologian Meister Eckhart, whom Fosse has read intently, describes it: ‘It is in darkness that one finds the light, so when we are in sorrow, then this light is nearest of all to us.’ None of the comparisons to other writers seem right. Bernhard? Too aggressive. Beckett? Too controlling. Ibsen? ‘He is the most destructive writer I know,’ Fosse claims. ‘I feel that there’s a kind of—I don’t know if it’s a good English word—but a kind of reconciliation in my writing. Or, to use the Catholic or Christian word, peace.’"

—Merve Emre, The New Yorker

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

"In The Other Name’s rhythmic accumulation of words, [there is] something incantatory and self-annihilating— something that feels almost holy."

—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street