Septology

The World of Septology

Asle is an aging Norwegian painter who lives alone on a fjord after the death of his wife Ales. He paints, he prays—he has converted to Catholicism, a rare choice in Norway—and he contemplates two crossed lines on a canvas he cannot quite finish. He has a neighbor, also named Asle, also a painter, who drinks heavily and whose life has gone in the direction Asle’s own life did not take. The two Asles may be doubles, may be aspects of the same consciousness, may be an exploration of contingency—of how the self that exists is always shadowed by the selves it did not become. Or they may simply be two men with the same name, living near each other in the Norwegian winter.

Septology is the collected edition of Fosse’s trilogy: The Other Name (Parts I and II), I Is Another (Parts III, IV, and V), and A New Name (Parts VI and VII), all published in Norwegian between 2019 and 2021 and translated by Damion Searls. The seven parts unfold across what appears to be a single extended present moment—a few days around Christmas—in which Asle drives to the city, visits the other Asle in the hospital, attends mass, drinks coffee, and thinks. The thinking is everything. The novel has almost no plot in the conventional sense. What it has instead is consciousness: a consciousness that moves in long, comma-linked sentences that circle back on themselves, repeat phrases with small variations, return to the same images and questions and memories without arriving at conclusions.

The prose style is the first thing a reader encounters and the thing that determines whether the novel is available to them. Fosse does not use paragraph breaks in the conventional sense. Sentences extend across pages. Dialogue—there is some—is embedded in the flow without quotation marks, indistinguishable in form from thought. The effect is initially disorienting and then, for readers who surrender to it, hypnotic: a rhythm that begins to feel like the actual movement of a mind that has been thinking the same thoughts for a long time.

Faith, Art, and the Double

Jon Fosse converted to Catholicism in 2013, and the conversion is central to Septology in ways that go beyond explicit religious content. The novel is saturated with a spiritual register that is not devotional in the conventional sense but is genuinely religious in its concern with what lies beyond the visible, with what persists through time, with whether there is a ground to existence that is more than the self’s own recursion. Asle’s Catholicism is not presented as an answer to these questions but as a practice—a daily structure of prayer and mass attendance that provides a relationship to the questions without resolving them.

The paintings are another form of the same practice. Asle returns again and again to the two crossed lines on his canvas—an X, or a cross, or simply two lines intersecting—trying to find what the image needs. The act of painting, in Fosse’s rendering, is not self-expression in the Romantic sense; it is something closer to listening, to waiting for what wants to appear. This is the same relationship that prayer has to transcendence in Asle’s practice: not demanding, not transactional, but patient and receptive.

The double—the other Asle, the drinker, the man whose life took the direction Fosse’s narrator’s did not—allows the novel to explore identity as contingency. Who we are is not fixed; it is the result of specific choices and specific refusals, and the self we did not become is always present as a shadow. The other Asle’s alcoholism and dissolution are not simply a contrast to the narrator’s stability; they are a reminder that the stability is not inherent, that the same person under different circumstances might have become the man in the hospital. Beckett is the comparison Fosse himself has acknowledged: the same formal stripped-down quality, the same concern with consciousness at the edge of dissolution, the same insistence that what cannot be said is the most important thing.

The Nobel Prize and Reading Fosse

Jon Fosse received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2023. The Nobel committee described him as giving “voice to the unsayable”—a phrase that is both precise and apt. Fosse is Norway’s most performed playwright (more performed even than Ibsen in some periods) and the author of many novels and poetry collections, but Septology is his largest and most ambitious prose work, and it is the one that most fully demonstrates what he can do at full stretch.

Damion Searls’s translation is widely praised as a major achievement in itself: the English rendering of Fosse’s long, comma-linked sentences preserves the rhythm without making it feel foreign, a balance that is extraordinarily difficult to achieve. Searls has spoken about working very closely with the Norwegian to find English equivalents for the specific way Fosse’s sentences move.

For new readers, the question of where to start with Fosse is real. His plays—Nightsongs, Someone Is Going to Come, the various monologues—are an alternative entry point, shorter and immediately powerful. Of his novels, the novellas Morning and Evening and Aliss at the Fire are accessible starting points that give a strong sense of his prose without the commitment of Septology’s 688 pages. But Septology itself, read with patience and without expectation of conventional narrative reward, is among the most sustained and serious achievements in contemporary world literature. The Nobel committee was recognizing not a career but a living writer at the height of his powers—and Septology is the proof of that assessment.

Our rating: 4.2/5 — Fosse’s masterwork is formally revolutionary and spiritually serious: a seven-part meditation on art, faith, and identity that demands complete surrender to its prose rhythm and repays that surrender with an experience unlike anything else in contemporary fiction.