Septology is a novel written by Jon Fosse, a Norwegian writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2023. The book is called a "septology", because it has seven parts, which are labeled as a trilogy, including "The Other Name", "I is Another" and "A New Name". And my copy of the "Septology" was printed in one volume, although I am not sure if in the original Norwegian, the septology really was a true trilogy.
Yes, this is a little confusing.
The book also eschews normal punctuation. It is over 650 pages long without a period, although there are question marks, commas and paragraph breaks, although at times those paragraph breaks come pages apart. This does make it hard to read at first.
Yes, this is confusing.
The book follows the life of Asle, a painter living near Bergen, Norway, who lives an isolated life as a widower. A devout Catholic, he paints abstract images, and remembers his life in a series of flashbacks, where he refers to himself looking at his younger self. At the same time, there is another painter named Asle, who Asle, the protagonist, finds after an alcoholic accident, and brings to the hospital for treatment. Since Asle (the protagonist) often refers to his past self in the third person, and also talks about being an alcoholic in the past, I was not sure, and am still not sure, whether this other Asle was actually a separate person, or was the narrator's doppelganger. Further complicating this naming issue is the fact that his dead wife is named Ales, and his best friend, a blue collar fisherman, is named Åsleik. It is possible that this naming convention is significant in Norwegian, but it was a bit opaque for me.
Despite some of these things being difficult and mysterious, after I got into the book, it was not that difficult to understand, and the format actually allowed me to read long sections of the book in a meditative state. The book is a biography that starts out as a bildungsroman, where the young Asle explores the world, and becomes a rebellious youth, and then enters an art school and becomes a respected artist, gets married, and later as a widower looks back and reflects on life, using his faith, and the works of Christian mystic Meister Eckhart to understand his life. The meditative, stream of consciousness nature of the text reflects the spiritual state of the protagonist. The book works well on that level, and despite the fact it took me almost a month to finish it, and I still am uncertain about what is going on in the book (is this doppelganger Asle a coincidence, magical realism, or a literary device?), I felt rewarded by reading a book that took a lot of focus.
The one thing I will say is that this book might have been revolutionary 100 years ago. I have read Remembrance of Things Past, and this book has a similar approach. But while stream of consciousness was revolutionary and changed literature when James Joyce or Marcel Proust did it, in the 21st century, it seems to be a curiosity, or a pet project for writer's writers. I liked reading this book, and would recommend it for people taking a deep dive into contemporary literature, but it is hard to imagine it setting off a literary explosion. Like I said about Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, I don't think many people would pick this book as the book that changed their life.