Septology, Jon Fosse (2019)
Septology, Jon Fosse (2019). I first read about Jon Fosse’s Nobel Prize winning novel sequence in the New York Times’s ‘100 Best Books of the 21st Century So Far’, which has suggested a number of my reading choices this past year; and then I browsed the text while visiting the Strand bookstore in Manhattan’s East Village around Christmas. And I knew I was fascinated, and I knew I would read it eventually, but I was also a bit intimidated; I knew this wouldn’t be an easy read, for reasons I’ll discuss below. Finally, at the beginning of March, I took the plunge - and it took me the better part of the month to read Septology, partly because I was traveling and playing God Street Wine shows, but also partly because it was, at least at first, slow going.
First the basics. Jon Fosse is a novelist, playwright and essayist, widely considered Norway’s greatest living writer, known for formal and stylistic experiments and exploration of existential and spiritual problems; his 2023 Nobel Prize praised his efforts to “give voice to the unsayable.” He writes in Nynorsk, the minority written version of Norwegian, and has cited Ibsen, Beckett, and Kafka as major influences. Septology is published as a single volume, in an English translation by Damion Searls, but is actually comprised of seven “books” divided into three sequential novels: I-II The Other Name, III-V I Is Another, and VI-VII A New Name - 667 pages in all, in this edition. And all of that is rendered without sentence breaks and, except when Fosse is rendering dialogue, without paragraph breaks. That’s right - almost 700 pages of prose, translated from Norwegian, that is all one single sentence. It’s daunting.
The story is told in the first person, from the perspective of Asle, an aging painter who lives in isolation on Norway’s western coast, and most of it consists of Asle’s inner monologue during a period of seven days. Each book begins with Asle contemplating his recently completed painting of a plain diagonal cross; each book except the last ends with some version of the Lord’s Prayer. Of the handful of other characters Asle is connected to, a number have names very similar to Asle: his late wife, Asel, with whom he frequently communes in his imagination; his neighbor, Åsleik, a loner fisherman who plows his driveway and stops over for laconic chats; and most similar of all, his doppleganger, Asle, another painter who lives in Bergen and strongly resembles Asle in looks, in age, and in their art, but diverges in his lack of religious faith, his troubled relationships, and his losing struggle with alcohol. The similarity of names points to a major theme of Septology, identity, the sameness and difference of different human beings and human identities. But there are also other characters: two women, apparently dopplegangers of each other, each named Guro; a gallery owner named Beyer; and numerous remembered figures from Asle’s past - including his parents, his sister, his teenage friends, his college landlady, and a sexual predator from his childhood named only the Bald Man, among others.
Although Asle is a painter, not a writer, he bears strong resemblances to Fosse: like Fosse, he turns out to be quite acclaimed for his art, although his isolated life makes this not apparent at first - mainly, for him, painting is a means of subsistence as well as a way of “painting away the pictures in my head.” Also like Fosse, he is sober, having recovered from an earlier period of severe alcohol abuse; and also like Fosse, he is a mid-life convert to Catholicism. In fact, Asle’s idiosyncratic, searching, mystical version of Catholicism is the core of the book’s spiritual substance. Not only does he pray frequently, both in his native tongue and in Latin; he also reflects at length on the meaning of Christmas, the Eucharist, Christian redemption, and the elusive nature of God.
As I read Septology, perhaps simply to avoid being overwhelmed, I found myself dividing the book’s spiritual themes into four: four distinct metaphysical areas of inquiry, all related to each other of course, all part of a greater whole, but nonetheless identifiable and distinct. And while there’s an element of arbitrariness to this, it helped me wrap my mind around some of the ideas in this sprawling book. The four themes are:
Identity: what do we mean when we say I? What is the difference between I and Not-I? What are the commonalities between human beings, human lives - what do we share? And what is the nature of the gulf that separates us into unique identities? What is universal and what is our subjective experience? Asle sees himself in other characters, most explicitly in the deceased Asel and in his doppleganger (also referred to as The Namesake); he also sees earlier versions of himself as somehow other, outside his present being, and the overall effect seems to be to destabilize the static boundaries between identities normally so central to the novel as literary form.
Art: what are we doing when we create? Are we having ideas, being inspired - or simply documenting how little we know or understand? If there is truth in a piece of art (or writing, or music, presumably) did we create that truth? Or discover it? Or know it all along, somewhere inside? Is our need to create related to our incompleteness, our separation into identities? For Asle, painting is a compulsion, a way of struggling against pain and meaninglessness:
because I have all these pictures inside me, yes, so many pictures that they’re a kind of agony, yes, it hurts me when they keep popping up again and again … the only thing I can do is paint, yes, try to paint away these pictures that are lodged inside me, there’s nothing to do but paint them away, one by one … I have to paint a picture in a way that dissolved the picture lodged inside me and makes it go away, so that it becomes an invisible forgotten part of myself, of my own innermost picture, the picture I am and have … (27-28)
Death: death is everywhere in Septology, both in Asle’s present experiences and in his memories. What are we, when we are no longer alive? How do we live on in the minds of others after we die? What is the boundary we cross, from life to non-life? After all “the invisible is present in both what dies and what doesn’t die” (268) How do we separate death from our emotions about it? In all the deaths Asle witnesses throughout the text -- his sister, his parents, his wife, a neighbor boy he doesn’t like, one of the two women named Guro, and finally his Namesake, the other Asle -- there’s an empty detachment, and ambiguous space that allows room for grief but also for belief and gratitude, as when Guro dies in a fire:
and then I think now Guro’s dead, yes, it’s sad, it’s always sad when someone is taken away forever, but now Guro is with God, now she’s resting in God, in God’s peace, in God’s light, I think, I’m sure of it, so when I look at it more clearly it’s not so sad, not that Guro went to church or was a Christian or anything, no, far from it, she probably wasn’t a believer at all, but she had a lot of God in her … (630)
God: what can be said about God? Why is it that language, the words we use both to describe and understand everything about our existence, fail us when it comes to God? Is God precisely that which cannot be said in words? What about religion, the church? Asle believes that human attempts to understand God through religion sometimes seemingly take us further from God, and that
many of the people who don’t believe in God are people who really do, while the ones who are doing all kinds of things to show that they believe in God actually believe in something other than God, they believe in an idol, because they believe in good works, in repentance and fasting, in sacraments, in the liturgy, in this or that conduct bringing them closer to God, yes, most of those who are inside are outside, and most who are outside are inside, the first shall be last, as is written … (547)
One of the people who “don’t believe in God but really do” is the salty fisherman neighbor Åsleik, who professes atheism but exudes a Godly innocence and peace in their daily interactions:
and suddenly I hear Åsleik say that even if he’s just a fisherman he knows a thing or two about how everything goes together, everything fits into a big unbreakable whole, people catch fish, for food, and for the fish to be caught this and that has to happen … and so everything goes together in a mysterious way, everything is one big whole, but you believe in God and I don’t, he says, and I say what I always say, that no one can really say anything about God and that’s why it’s meaningless to say that someone does or doesn’t believe in God, because God just is, he doesn’t exist in the way Åsleik imagines … He is outside time and space, He is something we can’t think, He doesn’t exist, He’s not a thing, in other words He’s nothing, I say … and Åsleik says what’s the point of thinking like that? that’s not something a person can believe in, is it? (80-81)
As the passages I’ve quoted hopefully show, these four themes interrelate and refract into one another. Ultimately the themes of identity, art, and death are, perhaps, subthemes of the greater Christian mystic pursuit of God - or perhaps they are best seen as human dimensions of that pursuit, without which “god” alone as a concept is nonsensical and deeply unsatisfying. I should add that, although Septology delves deep into these interrelated spiritual themes, that does not mean at all that it’s simply a long metaphysical tract. On the contrary, it’s also a story, and although plenty of it consists of digressions into the narrator’s memories and inner world, there’s also quite a lot of stuff that actually happens in the external world. In fact it is the way Fosse interweaves the metaphysics and spirituality with the actual events and conversations taking place in Asle’s life (and in his memories) that gives the book a lot of its uniqueness. Asle arranges an exhibition at his friend Beyer’s gallery in Bergen; he finds his double/doppleganger passed out drunk in the street, gets him into a hospital, and takes care of his dog; he plans a Christmas visit with Asleik and his sister. All this takes place in a wintry Norwegian setting that is, I have to admit, almost a parody of what you’d come up with if you had to devise a generic backdrop for “bleak existential experimental novel”; it occurred to me more than once that there’s a parallel between Septology’s Scandinavian sombreness and that of certain Ingmar Bergman movies like The Seventh Seal. Something about being north of the Baltic Sea, where the sun only shines for 5 or 6 hours a day in winter, lends itself to this sort of steely-eyed staring into the abyss at the heart of reality. Call me an essentialist, call me a geographic determinist - but I don’t think you could write Septology lying on a sunny beach in the Bahamas sipping a Negroni. Even the book’s jacket design - flat gray with black and white block text - doubles down on the uncompromising bleakness and seriousness. If you choose to go on the Jon Fosse Septology ride, this is what you're getting.
And it really is quite a ride. Although it is unquestionably serious and bleak, it is also rich in joy and awe. With a book like this I would argue that the reading experience is just as much the core of the book as the spiritual and philosophical content -- and the experience of reading Septology is an extraordinary one. Despite having been daunted, early on, by the text’s length and unpunctuated density, I soon found that reading Fosse’s breathless, rhythmic, uninterrupted prose was not at all difficult. You sort of get carried along by the narrative momentum and the music of the words - especially after those first 100 pages when you start to feel truly in a rapport with the author and the protagonist. It’s tempting to say that the text is more poetry than prose, but that’s not quite it; it’s prose with poetic elements and a poetic flow, but prose nonetheless, I’d say. Elements, characters, phrases, and ideas recur almost rhythmically -- the seven books that each begin and end in almost the same way (not quite identical) are a good example of this. The immersive flow of the text really becomes easy, enjoyable, and positively sensual - Bergmanesque bleakness notwithstanding.
Just as it took me a long time to read this book, it also took me longer than usual to write this review; I wanted to convey what is unique and special about the book, and give a taste of the prose, without giving away the many surprises contained inside. Ultimately I found Fosse’s novel cycle to be a unique, rewarding read and a bold portrayal of the state of being human. The book conveys in a granular way how human experience, for all people, is a simultaneous living swirl of our memories, our emotions, passions, joys and griefs, our spiritual yearnings and strivings, all intermixed with our prosaic physical existence and the mundane immediacy of the present moment. When it ended -- well, I won’t say anything to give away the ending in this review, but I will say that I found it beautiful, shattering, and awe inspiring. I urge you to check out Septology if you are ready to take on a challenging, serious literary experience and joyous spiritual journey rolled into one.
Read March 2025.