Norwegian writer Jon Fosse won the 2023 Nobel Prize for literature, and although this is awarded for a body of work, there seemed to be a general feeling amongst commentators that it was his magnum opus, ‘Septology’, that gave him that push over the line. Fosse has been working on this novel on and off for decades, parts of it already published, but despite weighing in at over seven hundred pages, and regularly referred to as ‘profound’ and ‘monumental’, Septology proves to be a relatively breezy read. This is largely because for a novel of its length, it doesn’t contain the usual commensurate amount of detail for the reader to absorb, and this is largely because Fosse, or his character, Asle, repeats himself continually throughout. He is man fixated on a limited number of ‘things’, with his mind correspondingly looping around connected sets of circuitries.
The entire book is Asle’s monologue, one very long sentence in fact, but again this is not difficult to read, with the straightforward speech and the repetitions, and of course one wonders why Fosse chose this form. What I think he is trying to do here is to cast a sort of spell upon the reader, a spell of a particular voice, and at times this works well, but at other times it just becomes boring, particularly towards the end when this reader had heard more than enough from this one man. Not that Asle is speaking to anyone. This is an interior monologue, an old man’s reckoning with his life, related, with long flashbacks, over three days preceding Christmas while he is struggling to finish what becomes his final painting, an abstract oil of St. Andrews Cross.
There are two Asles: our protagonist, a successful artist, who at a certain point gives up drinking so he can fulfill his creative potential, and a second Asle living in nearby town, who persists in his drinking until it destroys his art and life. The path not taken. Fosse plays these two off against one another and I feel one of strengths of the novel is the intricate patterning involved here. Names, personalities and events reflect one another in the two lives and Fosse effectively employs this, along with the repetitions, as a sort of binding mechanism for his long rambling narrative. The two Asles are like Siamese twins. Asle One knows things about Asle Two that, logically speaking, he couldn’t really know unless he also lived that life. And I think, with this, and much else, the coincidences, mirroring etc. you have to take it as it comes. The pay-off for the reader is the building up of a unity of mood, of atmosphere, of a certain world and world view.
So then what’s it all about? Art and the artist, a portrait and explication of genius, and with this I feel Fosse is less successful, indulging himself too often in shop-worn Romantic myths. Asle is an idiot savant, an unwitting channel for the divine, updated here to an ingenuous hippy (a figure physically described like the author is himself) Asle is a one-off, an intuitive spirit, disclaiming rationalism, traditions, who is led by instinct and blind inspiration (even in meeting his wife we have, on both sides, love at first sight).
All this seems an unlikely career path for any artist, particularly in the modern era. Where is his context, where are his antecedents? His only personal referent throughout is Meister Eckhart, an obscure medieval religious philosopher. Norway’s most acclaimed artist, Edvard Munch, is never mentioned, even though Asle seems to paint a lot like him. The considerable religious and artistic philosophising is often insightful, but just as often wincingly banal. Generally speaking, there is far too much faux profundity, pop psychology and odd repetitive motes that don’t lead anywhere. And increasingly, incantation stands in for depth.
Furthermore, we have the flip side of the unity above mentioned: Asle’s world is one with no humour, no irony, no playfulness, intellectual or otherwise. Characters, with notable the exception of the narrator, and to some extent his fisherman friend, Asleik, are two dimensional, with little depth or complexity.
To sum up, although I found Septology, certainly to begin with, absorbing and compelling, as I kept on, the artist’s creative authenticity, or lack thereof, along with the repetitions, finally became a problem for me. You could perhaps look upon the whole shebang as one giant fable, some potent myth for our times, but for this interpretation to succeed Fosse would need to seriously condense and cut, two writerly virtues that I suspect he disdains.