THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 17
WHEN I WASa graduate student in Boston
in the early 2000s, a priest told me about a
devout old man who had prayed only the
first word of the Lord’s Prayer for years
and years. With awe and even a little rever-
ence, the priest said he could never pray
like him, like that. I nodded respectfully
but thought the old man must have been
spiritually stuck, or maybe showing off a
little, a bedazzled believer overcome by
just the “Our” of the Our Father. Having
read the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse’s
“Septology,” 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, I’ve come into awe and reverence
myself for idiosyncratic forms of immense
metaphysical fortitude.
Fosse is one of those writers you feel
guilty you haven’t heard of already, or have
vowed to read someday (probably some
late October, after a major announcement
from Stockholm). His work — fiction, non-
fiction, poetry, plays and stories for chil-
dren — has been translated into 50 lan-
guages, and has received literary prizes
and critical acclaim for decades, not least
from his onetime student Karl Ove Knaus-
gaard, who has detailed Fosse’s impor-
tance to his own work both in essays and in
“My Struggle.” Knausgaard is a portraitist
of near-infinite self-focus; Fosse is also in-
terested in the dynamisms of self with self,
but also self with other, and ultimately self
with God, as evident throughout “Septol-
ogy.” First published in 2019 and translated
into simple, stark and often luminous Eng-
lish by Damion Searls in three volumes,
the books feel like the culminating project
of an already major career. They bring to-
gether his abiding interests in formal ex-
periment and in the making of art and iden-
tity, with his heightened interest in deeply
felt religious experience, the latter most
likely intensified by his own conversion to
Catholicism, in 2012.
“Septology” is narrated by Asle
(also a Catholic convert), a widowed
painter living outside a coastal vil-
lage in Norway. The action tran-
spires over the course of a few mem-
ory- and prayer-filled days around
Christmas, while he’s working on a
painting of a purple line and a brown
line intersecting to form an X, which
he likens to the cross of St. Andrew.
Asle is visited only by his neighbor,
Asleik, a salty and chatty fisherman
who’s always inviting him to dinner
at his sister’s. He drives to the
nearby town, to check on his name-
sake and doppelgänger, another
painter named Asle. The latter is
gravely ill, hospitalized because of
alcoholism, and the narrator Asle is
taking care of his dog, Bragi. The cli-
mactic (outward) event of the seven
novels is a boat ride Asle takes with
the dog and the neighbor, to attend
Christmas dinner at Asleik’s sister’s
house. He dies in the spare bedroom
before they eat her specialty, smoked
lamb ribs.
The seven-novel sequence, nearly
800 pages, is narrated in a stream of
consciousness with no sentence
breaks, and the namesake-doppel-
gänger story line is never defini-
tively established as an extended
speculative exercise or an astounding co-
incidence (or taciturn act of autofiction).
Each novel begins, midthought, the same
way, with Asle reflecting on how to finish
his painting of the St. Andrew cross; each
one ends the same way, mid-Latin prayer,
at least until something else happens in the
final book. Nevertheless, Asle is a recog-
nizable type, recalling the main figures of
Marilynne Robinson’s “Gilead” and Paul
Harding’s “Tinkers,” T.S. Eliot’s “Geron-
tion” and Samuel Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last
Tape”: old men surveying their lives, bal-
ancing immediate-feeling questions about
mortality with intense, incomplete and
ambivalent memories of past events and
people, and also the heightened demands
of everyday life near its end. This is Asle
when he’s remembering childhood experi-
ences like lying to his mother about where
he got a handful of krone coins; playing on
a rocky beach with his sister; seeing his
grandfather’s boots shining in the rain; go-
ing to art school against his skeptical par-
ents’ wishes; meeting his future wife,
Ales; leaving the Church of Norway; be-
coming a Catholic; and likewise when he’s
worrying, as an elderly person, about
whether to drive in bad weather; whether
he knows someone’s name in a pub;
whether to walk the dog in a snowstorm;
whether to sell or store a painting;
whether to accept an invitation to Christ-
mas dinner.
Whatever Asle’s minor encounters and
fragmented memories mean on their own,
these are ultimately secondary to his de-
tailing an intense, unbroken feeling of con-nectedness to God. In this way, Asle is not
like Gerontion and the rest: He wants “to
comprehend the incomprehensible” about
his life, about life itself and about God.
Moreover, unlike, say, the equivalent de-
sire and quest in Dante’s “Paradiso,”
there’s no epic otherworldly journey lead-
ing up to a symphony of magisterial-meta-
physical ecstasy. In fact, there’s really not
much movement, outwardly or inwardly, at
all. Asle is, more or less, already there —
knowing and feeling known by God. This
sense, in turn, irradiates his thoughts and
feelings about the vocation and work of an
artist, and likewise about what it means for
a believer to respond to the felt presence ofGod in his life — even with a brashly uncul-
tured, nonbelieving fisherman coming by
to needle him for painting a weird picture
over and over and going to church too
much.
The repetitiveness of the novel’s open-
ing and closing conceits, the paucity of con-
ventional events and the stream-of-con-
sciousness narrating for hundreds of sen-
tence-free pages are, together, finally less
provocative than the intactness of the pro-
tagonist’s conviction, to paraphrase the
opening of John’s Gospel, that the world is
a dark place, that a divine light shines
through this darkness, and that the dark-ness does not overcome it. Amid
bouts of depression and doubt, Asle
deeply believes this, and wants to
convey it in his painting:
“It’s always, always the darkest
part of the picture that shines the
most, and I think that that might be
because it’s in the hopelessness and
despair, in the darkness, that God is
closest to us, but how it happens,
how the light I get clearly into the
picture gets there, that I don’t know,
and how it comes to be at all, that I
don’t understand, but I do think that
it’s nice to think that maybe it came
about like this, that it came to be
when an illegitimate child, as they
put it, was born in a barn on a win-
ter’s day, on Christmas in fact, and a
star up above sent its strong clear
light down to earth, a light from God,
yes it’s a beautiful thought, I think,
because the very word God says that
God is real, I think, the mere fact that
we have the word and idea God
means that God is real, I think, what-
ever the truth of it is it’s at least a
thought that it’s possible to think, it’s
that too, even if it’s no more than
that, but it’s definitely true that it’s
just when things are darkest, black-
est, that you see the light, that’s
when this light can be seen, when the
darkness is shining, yes, and it has always
been like that in my life at least, when it’s
darkest is when the light appears, when
the darkness starts to shine, and maybe it’s
the same way in the pictures I paint, any-
way I hope it is.”IN A LATER VOLUME,reflecting on the dark-
ness of art and life alike, Asle observes that
“a picture’s not done until there’s light in
it.” This is a hope that Caravaggio no doubt
would have recognized, and is also, in bril-
liant, subtle ways, Fosse’s preparation for
the end of “Septology” itself.
It’s only in the final pair of novels, now
appearing in English under the title “A
New Name,” that Asle stops painting the
brown line and the purple line. He accepts
that these efforts, in art and in his relation-
ships with others and with God, matter
only insofar as they create the space for an
in-breaking of light and a presence not his
own. Feeling weak and lying down in a
stranger’s spare bedroom before dinner,
Asle prays as he has at the end of each pre-
ceding novel. Only this time, he is deci-
sively interrupted: “I breathe slowly in
and out and I move my thumb and finger
up to the third bead and I say to myself Ave
Maria Gratia plena Dominus... and I a
ball of blue light shoots into my forehead
and bursts and I say reeling inside myself
Ora pro nobis peccatoribus nunc et in
hora.” “Septology” ends with a portrait of a
person’s life now completed by — because
of — light that has entered it. In turn, Fosse
leaves the final earthly sentence open to
who and what comes next. 0He Is Us
An extraordinary series of novels about an artist’s reckoning with the divine.
By RANDY BOYAGODA
Jon FossePHOTOGRAPH BY TOM A. KOLSTAD
RANDY BOYAGODAis a professor of English at
the University of Toronto. His latest novel is
“Dante’s Indiana.”
THE OTHER NAME: SEPTOLOGY I-II
By Jon Fosse
Translated by Damion Searls
336 pp. Transit Books. Paper, $17.95.
I IS ANOTHER: SEPTOLOGY III-V
By Jon Fosse
Translated by Damion Searls
251 pp. Transit Books. Paper, $17.95.
A NEW NAME: SEPTOLOGY VI-VII
By Jon Fosse
Translated by Damion Searls
197 pp. Transit Books. Paper, $17.95.
He wants to ‘comprehend the
incomprehensible’ about his life,
about life itself and about God.