No Full Stop

Septology a novel by Jon Fosse.  Transit Books.  667 pp.  $22.95  *****

Often when I finish a long novel I have a feeling of accomplishment, or relief; “Well now that’s done: and I’m glad it’s over,” as the woman says in The Wasteland (about another subject).  But in the case of Septology, I feel bereft.  It’s as if a close friend has just died.  I don’t know what to do with myself, now that I can’t see him anymore.

The book, which consists of seven separate books (hence the title) and which was published as three volumes (The Other Name, I is Another, and A New Name) is famously one long sentence, and there’s no period even at the end, so I suppose that theoretically it could go on.  It is said to be the masterwork of Jon Fosse, who won the Nobel Prize in 2023, but had had a long and distinguished career as a playwright before he wrote this novel, and wrote a collection of earlier novels before writing plays.

It is not factually autobiographical (or autofiction, which seems to be a new term for such work), but it definitely plays with details of Fosse’s life in tantalizing ways.  Fosse himself has been married three times, and has three children from the first two wives.  During his time as a playwright, his drinking got out of control, to the point where he was drinking round the clock.  He then met his third wife and converted to Catholicism, after not being religious for much of his life; he also stopped drinking.  It is during his post-drinking Catholic life that he composed Septology.

His protagonist, rather than being a novelist, is a painter, and has painted all his life.  He has been married just once, and his wife has died, but it was she who convinced him to convert to Catholicism and, eventually, to give up drinking (those two things don’t follow one another as clearly as they did in Fosse’s own life).  This man is named Asle, and his wife was named Ales.  If these two names aren’t confusing enough, Asle has a doppelganger, also named Asle, who lives in a nearby city, looks very much like him, dresses exactly like him (in a black velvet jacket, carrying a leather satchel) and is also an extremely talented painter.  He, however, has been married twice, has three children by the two wives, and at this point in his life is living alone, in the throes of severe alcoholism.  Our protagonist Asle, in fact, is deeply concerned about him, makes a last-minute trip to the other city late one evening and finds the man lying dead drunk in the snow; he undoubtedly would have died if our protagonist hadn’t found him.  He gets him to a clinic, then to a hospital, and for the rest of the novel is concerned about the man’s condition but unable to visit because he’s not family.  (I’m his doppelganger! he should have said, but that probably wouldn’t have helped.)

Asle the drunken painter seems to be the road not taken for our protagonist; that is what would have happened if he hadn’t met Ales, converted to the Church, and given up booze[1].  It is like one of those fantasy stories where there is an alternative reality showing the life you might have led, but it’s not in another reality; it’s in the next city.  As if that weren’t confusing enough, there are two women named Guro who look almost exactly alike and sometimes appear in the same coffeehouse together.  One of them is the sister of our protagonist’s friend Asleik, a man who looks after him and keeps him in food, deeply appreciates the man’s painting, but is in other ways a real pill, one of the dullest conversationalists in the history of Western literature.

The other Guro is a woman who lives in the other city, seems to have spent a lot of illicit time with Asle the alcoholic, but also knows the work of our protagonist, who has an exhibit every year at the gallery of a man named Beyer.  She has never had enough money to buy one of his paintings, but does admire them.  She also claims, rather coyly, to have slept with Asle on a number of occasions, but here she seems to be confusing the two Asles (an easy enough thing to do in this book).  I’m not absolutely sure she’s confusing them, of course.  Our protagonist had a period when he drank too much, and he may have made other mistakes as well.

All this sounds tremendously confusing, I know.  Characters who look alike and have the same names, lives that tantalizingly echo each other and also echo the life of their creator, the whole 667 pages written as one long sentence.  It doesn’t make sense! I can imagine a frustrated reader saying.  And it doesn’t.  But life also doesn’t make sense; the longer I live, the more I feel that way.[2]  And if the book doesn’t make sense as I describe it (I’m doing my best here), it makes perfect sense as you read it.  Our protagonist starts thinking about Asle and you wonder for a few seconds which one he means, but it soon becomes apparent.  Emotionally, as the story of a sixty-something artist at the end of his career, it makes perfect sense.  He’s seeing the life he led and the life he might have led.  He sees the contrast with gratitude.

There are two major differences between the two Asles.  One met Ales and the other didn’t (the story of their meeting, and of their whole romance, is absolutely captivating.  Ales is a great and original character, and if I have one frustration about this novel, it is that I didn’t get to see more of her.  I’d like to have a whole novel about her).  The other is that our narrator met Beyer, who happened to own a gallery and who championed his work throughout his life.  The other Asle tried to peddle his paintings on the street.  That didn’t work out too well.[3]

There are repeating motifs in the novel that also have the effect of grounding us.  One is the painting that he looks at as the first book opens (“And I see myself standing and looking at the picture with the two lines that cross in the middle, one purple line, one brown line, it’s a painting wider than it is high and I see that I’ve painted the lines slowly . . .”); he thinks about that painting at the beginning of all seven books.  The other motif that ends every day, and also punctuates the days as well, is a period of prayer in his native language (translated for us) and in Latin as well.  He has a regular practice of prayer, which he connects with his art; the art comes from the same dark place that he gets to with his praying.  Darkness doesn’t represent evil in this world, just confusion, or not knowing; his work, and his religious sense, come out of that.  The darkness shines.  It is that shining that he finds in all his best paintings.  It marks his best work.

Septology is a deeply religious novel.  While I was reading, in fact, I devoted two entries in Evening Mind to quotations from the book, and could now probably include twice as many; I had a habit of marking pages where such passages appeared.  He is hardly an orthodox Catholic  (he makes Graham Greene seem orthodox).  God does not exist, he says on more than one occasion; He is not a being.  God is.  And my favorite quotation, which I’m sure I can’t find so I will try to quote from memory, at least quote the feeling: when you get to a point that you realize you don’t understand God, and will never understand God, then you understand God.  I concur.[4]

I wouldn’t say that Septology is easy reading; I don’t recommend it for the beach this summer.  But I also didn’t find it especially difficult: it’s a long sentence, I admit, but the syntax is generally clear, except toward the end of the book when our protagonist himself gets less coherent.  It is enthralling.  You want it never to end, even at moments when it seems it never will end.  You live with it and it lives with you.  I don’t think I’ll ever be finished with this book, even if I never read it again.

[1] He gave up ales for Ales, I’m tempted to say, but I’m sure many people have thought of that.

[2] See Steve Hagen’s fascinating book, Why the World Doesn’t Seem to Make Sense, and follow it up with its annoying but ultimately profound sequel, The Great Delusion.

[3] And maybe he just wasn’t as talented.  But I don’t know who we would consult about that.

[4] I would say the same thing about sitting meditation.  When you finally realize that you don’t know how to do it, and never will know, then you understand meditation.  That’s what Krishnamurti kept trying to say.