A New Name: Septology VI-VII

“The Septology as a whole, and A New Name in particular, is an extraordinary meditation on art and love, and the possibility of eternity. Each of the individual sections in the book is a single sentence. Those sentences have an incantatory feel to them. There is a lot of repetition, a lot of repeated images, repeated sections. It has an extraordinary hypnotic quality. Frequently, the reader will shift from being inside the mind of character A to character B and it will take a moment before you realise it, but that’s entirely deliberate. The prose is luminous. It’s like swimming in an open sea. You can’t see land in any direction. You aren’t trying to. You have no frame of reference as to where you are. You are simply here, and must deal with the waves as they come. It’s a reading experience unlike anything else I’ve come across in the last several years, and an extraordinary meditation on human mortality and human endeavour, what we do with our lives, what we don’t do, what we may regret, what we may invest ourselves in—in terms of our art or whatever it is.” Read more...

The Best of World Literature: The 2022 International Booker Prize Shortlist

Frank Wynne, Translator