The plot of Septology is organized into increasingly detailed layers, with the first (or last), highest (or lowest) layer being essentially plotless. Each of this multivolume work’s seven parts—or at least the first two, published together as The Other Name, and the next three as I Is Another—begins with the words “And I see myself standing and looking at.” It is those first four words alone—“And I see myself”—that constitute the first-or-last layer. This opening refrain, and its occasional recurrence, is the sole indication that the subsequent layer is in fact itself contained within something else, that it is not technically the outermost narrative. How appropriate that Fosse, Searls, or both, introduce its protagonist in each part with the reflexive pronoun, grammatically an object before he is a subject. Whatever happens in that layer, in which the narrator-character Asle is “standing and looking,” as well as thinking, talking, driving, sleeping, and a few other things, he is doing so in the memory, imagination, or out-of-body view of another I, another Asle—the first, as it happens, of many.
This other I does much more than the narrator that simply sees him. In the first volume, The Other Name, he has twice driven back and forth from his home in the tiny village of Dylgja to the small city of Bjørgvin (an old name for Bergen in Western Norway); saved an alcoholic friend (also named Asle, sometimes known as the Namesake) who is suffering from delirium tremens and ends up in the Hospital (recurring place-names or epithets tend to be capitalized like Platonic ideals in Fosse); spoken with another friend, with a slightly different name, Åsleik (ikke means not in Norwegian); contemplated his newest painting—two lines, one brown and one purple, crossing diagonally (“St. Andrew’s Cross,” Åsleik repeats); and prayed (to God). In this second volume, he does some of these same things: he drives to Bjørgvin, he has repetitive conversations with Åsleik, and he prays. But he also speaks to Beyer, the owner of the gallery that exhibits his paintings once a year; tries and fails to visit the Namesake in the hospital; and goes for dinner at Åsleik’s house, where he agrees to join this not-Asle for Christmas for the first time.
The bulk of both The Other Name and I Is Another happens in a third layer, a mixture of memory and imagination. Whenever Asle falls asleep, or into a trance while driving or looking out his window, he falls further into visions of his own past, the past of his Namesake, and, on a few occasions, even the present of that ailing Namesake: in his home, falling over drunk, at the Hospital. The two pasts are sometimes indistinguishable, but, barring a major revelation in the third volume, they are usually simply memories, verified as such in conversation. So, for all its complexities and for all the hedges and qualifications I feel it necessary to make, Septology is predominantly the personal history of a highly regarded abstract painter from western Norway named Asle (one more hedge: told in the third person).
In The Other Name, the narrator “sees” himself as a young boy. The first event he recalls is a walk with his sister Alida along the shoreline, where they are not allowed alone. This is not the first time that Fosse has written the story of a boy taking a secret walk on the beach with his younger sister, and nor are these the first Asle’s in his novels. On their walk, they encounter an irritating boy named Bård who takes a boat out, evidently to impress the siblings, and subsequently drowns, the first in a series of sudden deaths in Asle’s life.
The narrative of I Is Another picks up after the second major event in The Other Name, an act of sexual abuse committed in a car by “the Bald Man.” The Other Name closes with a description of this abuse, chilling in both its detail and the conformity of its understated tone to the rest of the novel in both volumes so far, which Searls translates with extraordinary consistency—largely Anglo-Saxon, largely mono- and bisyllabic, and largely void of adverbs and subordinate clauses. In the beginning of I is Another, the focus shifts to Asle’s resultant confused shame. He is ashamed about the inexplicable event, ashamed about the strange excitement he feels alongside his deep disgust and distress, and now ashamed that his mother has found the three kroner the Bald Man gave him to keep quiet. This feeling compounds as secrets beget secrets and lies beget lies. Fosse stands here in a line of great Norwegian novelists of shame: Knut Hamsun, Tarjei Vesaas, Dag Solstad, a well-known student of Fosse’s named Karl Ove Knausgaard, and, most recently, Vigdis Hjorth. As Knausgaard has described, shame is almost inevitable in a culture in which silent stoicism is among the highest virtues, and pain is forced into secrecy.
As I Is Another continues, Asle encounters—or rather remembers encountering, or even sees himself remembering encountering—a few others, many of whom share that same secret pain, most often associated with their fathers, who are womanizers, alcoholics, indigents. Most stricken by this filial affliction is an older boy named Sigve, the son of a German soldier, which is to say a Nazi: “it was the worst shame possible,” Sigve says. Asle runs into Sigve a few times in their hometown of Barmen, but it is in the larger town of Aga, where Asle has come to attend the Academic High School with the intention of moving on to the Art School in Bjørgvin, that they become especially close. And there, in a moment of unparalleled drama, Sigve performs his most significant function by introducing Asle to Asle:
[. . .] yes, a painter lives there in Stranda, a picture painter, and he’s usually at the hotel there, and Sigve’s talked with him a lot, he’s a smart guy, but dead broke [. . .] and he, the picture painter, yes, as a matter of fact his name is Asle too, and he can’t be much older than you, Sigve says
And it’s really strange, he says
Because he reminds me a lot of you, he says
This isn’t the first time that dialogue is broken up across a few short paragraphs, each ending with “he says,” but it seems to me the most extreme example. Here it reads something like a B-movie cutting closer and closer to a character’s face as he reveals some unexpected truth—there is another. But neither Fosse nor any of the Asles will allow a moment of such high drama to last for long. It’s only right that they pause their insoluble conflict and agree to deflate it, refusing for the moment to accept that this unprecedented moment in Asle’s life will completely change his sense of the universe’s stability. Sigve’s revelation warrants only a single word in response from Asle: “Yes.” It may be the most passive word in the English language, and though there might not have been many options, Searls was right to choose “yes.” Even “Okay” would have signified more.
The first meeting between Asle and Asle—two painters who look the same, dress the same, make the same kind of art, and have the same name—prompts in our Asle a minor obsession with uniqueness as a prerequisite for validity. Sitting in a bar with the Namesake and Sigve, Asle begins to ignore his surroundings and ponder a train of thought, one that runs from the many others who have sat in the bar, to their deaths, to his death, to his soul, to the singularity of his soul. The two Asles’ bodies may resemble each other, but “their souls, their spirits, can’t be as similar,” Asle tells himself. After the Namesake leaves, Asle looks out at the fjord and thinks: “all the waves are different, and all the clouds are different . . . and that’s how they are in a good painting too, no wave is just a wave and no cloud is just a cloud.” The penultimate question at the end of this chain would have to be: “Is my soul my own?” The ultimate one is ultimate indeed: the question of death, which, in “The Novel in Its Great Irony,” Fosse calls “not a mystery to be solved but an inherent condition of the novel.” The two certainties Asle is forced to synthesize are that the only thing left of a person after death is their soul, as encounters with dead bodies have confirmed to him, and that, if their souls are indeed the same, the only thing separating him from this other painter is the body. The conclusion: God knows—really. As Fosse ends “The Novel in Its Great Irony,” “to me, the novel . . . is constantly in search of the lost God.” Unfortunately for Asle, he doesn’t yet know that he, too, is on such a search.
It is meeting his second counterpart, his other soul-mate, his wife Ales (it’s the same, but different) that sets him on the path to religion in the form of the Catholic Church. Asle spends much of the first two volumes of Septology mourning Ales, and that I have so far neglected to mention her is only a result of my focus on the strand of the novel that is Asle’s life story. Up to this volume, Ales’s role has been mostly ethereal. She sometimes appears as a spirit (imagined or not—both—“unity / of what is / and what is not,” as one Fosse poem goes in Akerholt’s translation) next to the narrating Asle, often directly before or after his reveries, and when she does appear with a body it is as “a young woman with long black hair,” one whom Asle seemingly finds too painful to identify as his wife. But when she enters the life-story narrative it is the most tender exchange of the novel, the joyous twin of the disquieting meeting with the Namesake. Their meeting is something like a strange marriage ceremony, as they exchange remarks on their similarities and differences: “You have brown hair and I have dark hair, Ales says” (they’re the same, but different); “Now we’re boyfriend and girlfriend, Ales says,” and they never separate until her death. Each part of Septology opens with the painting Asle has just finished of two lines crossing, a purple line and a brown line, and Asle has often described the way the painting radiates, how “what really makes the picture shine is the thin layer of white paint I painted in a few places after I looked at the picture in the dark.” Asle is, to some extent, Fosse; the painting is the novel; the shine in the dark applies to the intersection of Asle and Ales’s lives just as well as to that of the purple and brown lines.
Through Ales, Asle finds God, and by the time he takes his drives to Bjørgvin he is deeply religious. Just as each part of Septology begins “And I see myself,” each ends with a prayer: the Lord’s Prayer, the Salve Regina, or the Ave Maria, in Latin and Asle’s own Nynorsk (New Norwegian) translations (Searls offers the prayers in their standard English translations). In Part III, he “think[s] over and over again Let thy kingdom come”; in each part from II on he takes deep breaths while repeating “Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me,” “While I breathe in deeply Lord and while I breathe out slowly Jesus and while I breathe in deeply Christ and while . . . ”; and the second epigraph of The Other Name is “Dona nobis pacem”—“Grant us thy peace”—from the Agnus Dei portion of the Mass. The heart of Asle’s religion is the prayer for grace and peace.
Fosse has written that his “style of writing, with its invoking repetitions, has much in common with the language of the Bible and of the Christian tradition.” His tendency toward repetition has had various purposes to various effects through his career, but in Septology it seems that along with their stylistic effect they represent a narrator desperate for stability. In the same essay in which he refers to “invoking repetitions,” Fosse professes that “it is necessary to write one or more characters and a world with so much consistency that a change, let’s say on page five, alters many other things in the novel.” Asle would like a world that he can look at the way he looks at the water outside of his house, as he describes a few times in roughly the same way:
I look at my fixed spot in the water, at my landmark, the tops of the pines in front of the house need to be in the middle of the middle right pane, because the window is divided in half, and can be opened from both sides, and each side of the window is divided into three panes, and the middle one on the right side is where the tops of the pines need to be.
He depends absolutely on his habits. But the world is not so stable, and of all its changes, death is the most destabilizing. It seems that loved ones’ deaths, which can often be the most horrible for their very stability in the eternity that is grief, are instead hardest for Asle because they are sudden, unexpected changes.
The most impressive feat of Damion Searls’s translation is its conveyance of the comfort of habit and the shock of change. In an interview for the Booker Prize Foundation, Searls explains that the particular challenge of translating Septology was “to keep the smoothness, and the slowness, through all this fluidity. It can’t ever be clunky or get bogged down or lurch around, not for a moment, without breaking the spell.” He has succeeded there. The novel is technically a single sentence (though Fosse might tell you a novel is always “a kind of mega-sentence”) with the word and in place of periods, and while that may not be the same grammatical achievement or challenge of a long Proustian or Bernhardian sentence, it is an exceptional challenge in terms of rhythm. Fosse is a poet, his singular style a sustained rhythm with refrains and an entrancing flow from start to finish. Any hiccups would be catastrophic. It’s hard to cite an absence, but I can quote a moment in which sudden death arrives and the novel’s flow is briefly diverted. After Asle’s mother asks him to paint a picture of their house, we learn that his sister Alida has died:
and she says that she’s been thinking about it for a long time but she hasn’t brought herself to ask him about it, because he’d been having a hard time since, Mother says and she breaks off and then there’s a long silence and Asle asks why did Mother have to remind him about Sister again, about how she was gone so suddenly, how she just died, was just lying there dead in her bed one morning, yes, the thought of his sister Alida just lying there and dead he can’t take it
Anyway, Mother says
Until now the scene has been standard Fosse dialogue, a slightly tense conversation between family members, but then comes a break, a silence, and a fluttering, anxious grief. The difference between “lying there and dead he can’t take it” and “lying there dead and he can’t take it” demonstrates precisely how delicate a translation like this is, and how fluidly Searls has handled it.
Septology has not yet been published in full in English. A look at the Transit Books covers of The Other Name and I Is Another side by side—the left and middle of the St. Andrew’s Cross painting—suggests that writing about it now is sort of like writing about the Mona Lisa without having yet seen its top third (“Update: She appears to be smiling.”) But what we have so far are two thirds of an incredibly beautiful, mysterious, maybe mystical piece of literature, with all the qualities that have earned Fosse his reputation. Of course, what happens in the third volume will change what has happened in the first two, and the insoluble web will grow. Nothing is isolated; everything is subject to everything.
