Nepenthe

 By Shanghai Tango  

Max Norman for The New Yorker , where you can listen to this story. Damion Searls, who has translated a Nobel laureate, believes his craft isn’t about transforming or reflecting a text. It’s about conjuring one’s experience of it. Jon Fosse’s “Septology,” the seven-novel sequence about art and God that helped win its author last year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, stars two men and a dog. The men are both painters, and, confusingly, both named Asle. The dog, however, is quite straightforward: he’s called Bragi. He is the all-comprehending, inky-eyed companion to the first Asle, though he belongs to the other Asle, who’s ill and can’t look after him. The novel’s lazy river of a narrative is punctuated, much in the way of real life, whenever Bragi needs to be let out to do his business, or has licked his water bowl dry, or, with a laughable but also slightly troubling frequency, takes a tumble when Asle stands up without remembering that the dog is lying on his lap. Asle’s gr...

by Brian Bilston

  𝑵𝒂𝒏𝒄𝒚 𝑴𝒊𝒕𝒇𝒐𝒓𝒅