The Other Name: Septology I-II
by Jon Fosse
tr. Damion Searls
(Fitzcarraldo, Oct. 2019; Transit, April 2020)
Reviewed by Spencer Ruchti
Not long into Part I of Jon Fosse’s Septology, the narrator, Asle, confesses to speaking with the dead. His young wife, Ales, has killed herself; this suicide becomes the mournful obsession of Fosse’s seven-part novel. “There’s no big difference or distance between life and death, between the living and the dead, even though the difference can seem insurmountable it isn’t,” Asle thinks. In the four decades following the publication of his first book, Raudt, svart, Jon Fosse has written repeatedly on suicide, melancholy, excruciating loss, the role or absence of God, and the border between this life and whatever follows. To read his enormous body of work in panorama is to see the frequent exchanges between the living and the dead, but also beautiful white visions as the curtain draws shut. “The whole of Septology is possibly just an instant, a loaded one, a moment of death. When a person dies it is said that one sees life repeated. Septology can maybe read as such a moment,” Fosse has said in an interview with his Norwegian editor Cecilie Seiness. This “instantaneous” novel of moments is also the longest Fosse ever written. One can’t help but assign it the reverence of a denouement as the author approaches the twilight of his career.
Born near Haugesund on Norway’s west coast in 1959, Jon Fosse is the author of dozens of novels, plays, poems, and children’s books, only a fraction of which have been translated into English. While his international reputation is as a playwright, in the U.S. he’s known almost exclusively for his brief, phantasmagoric fictions about lovers and wanderers—Trilogy, Morning and Evening, Aliss by the Fire, and recently the collection Scenes from a Childhood—that possess a propulsive, singular voice across translations.
At the start of The Other Name, which collects Parts I and II of Fosse’s Septology series, Asle has just finished a painting called St. Andrew’s Cross. The painting feels incomplete—when is a work of art finished?—but mostly Asle doesn’t want to look at it. It’s only two lines on a canvas. Can it be considered a painting? he wonders. Asle has few people in his life and paints for hours every day. There’s his neighbor, Åsleik, a stony fisherman who plows Asle’s driveway and asks him for paintings every Christmas, paintings that Åsleik can gift to his sister. There’s a man who lives on the edge of the sea, also named Asle, also a painter, who suffers from debilitating alcoholism. At first it’s unclear if this other Asle is real, a figment of the narrator’s imagination, an alternate version, or some combination. Asle has visions of his “doppelgänger” at home, shaking and shivering on the floor, a condition the narrator himself once endured until his wife pulled him from the brink.
The Other Name not only shares the themes of Fosse’s previous works, but some of the characters as well. Another Asle appears in the stories of Scenes from a Childhood, in which Fosse says his goal was to “write about my own childhood, the way things really happened. That turned out to be impossible for me... I cannot help writing fiction.” There’s yet another Asle (and an Alida, Ales, and Åsleik, near anagrams of one another) in Trilogy, and in Aliss at the Fire; all are of the same general disposition, if one can attribute “character traits” to any of the specters in Fosse’s work. Is it possible that Fosse is writing the same novel over and over, mining the same ideas into annihilation, in the tradition of Thomas Bernhard or László Krasznahorkai? The fractal-like repetition of ideas, names, and images across Fosse’s works create an unmistakable tapestry, engendered in part by his distinct style that eschews punctuation and dialogue markers, meanders in and out of digression, and ignores tense conventions with the rhythm of breath.
Because of this meandering sameness, it’s often difficult to distinguish between Fosse’s two Asles as the lines of their biographies blur on the page. Are they the same person? Or versions of the same person running parallel lives, separated by irreversible choices? Asle speaks in the first person, while the thoughts and memories of his doppelgänger are projected in the third person. “I realize I’m driving right past the apartment building where Asle lives, in Sailor’s Cove, right at the edge of the sea…” Asle the narrator thinks about his doppelgänger. “I see Asle lying there on his sofa and he’s shaking, his whole body’s shivering, and Asle thinks can’t this shaking stop? and he’s thinking he slept on the couch last night because he couldn’t get up and get undressed and go lie down in bed…” Instead of imagining the life of his doppelgänger, Asle seems to become him, bearing his thoughts, insecurities, and suicidal ideations in the third person. There are other similarities that unify the two past the borders of coincidence. Asle the narrator has recovered from alcohol addiction, while his doppelgänger continues to deteriorate from it. Asle the narrator has lost his wife to suicide; his doppelgänger to divorce; both paint to make their living. One is reminiscent of the other’s personal failings. Midway through the novel, Asle discovers his namesake sprawled in the snow outside a bar, unable to move. (The scene is reminiscent of Simon Tanner finding his brother dead in the snow in Robert Walser’s The Tanners.) Asle saves his life by giving him enough alcohol to function again—“to get back to normal… to be the way other people are”—before taking him to a Clinic. When Asle tries to leave, his doppelgänger begins to hallucinate that the two are stuck on a boat off the coast of Norway: “But you can’t go, we’re too far out at sea.”
Late in the novel, in a scene that speaks to Fosse’s immense capacity for writing grief, the pet dog of Asle’s doppelgänger, Bragi, leaps into bed as the narrator lies there. The warmth of the canine’s body immediately evokes a memory of Ales. “I feel so tired and then I feel Ales lying there next to me in bed,” Asle thinks, “and we’re holding each other tight and giving each other warmth and I can’t think about Ales, not now… I can’t talk with you tonight, Ales, I say, because then I’ll start just missing you so much, so terribly much.” His memories of his life with Ales are touchingly maudlin, scenes of youth and innocence in a novel filled with the opposite of these things. Notably, the collective Asle appears to be Fosse’s most autobiographical character to date. In 2012, the author quit drinking and converted to Catholicism. Just as Asle finds his doppelgänger passed out in the snow, the event that lead Fosse to sobriety was predicated by a public collapse. Like Asle, Fosse was never inebriated, but felt he had to “drink to be normal.”
When Asle experiences memories of his wife, he sees them manifest before him in glimmering tableaux. Asle and Ales hold hands at the park. They lie beneath Asle’s large black coat. We see them kissing and making snow angels. “I see them standing there, not moving, they’re like a picture, like one of those pictures I’ll never forget, a picture I’ll paint, I need to paint them close to me and paint them away,” Asle thinks. Fosse approaches aesthetic beauty with naivety. What makes a painting beautiful? What allures us—and what is dangerous—about the rose-colored past? “What’s beautiful in life turns out bad in a painting because it’s like there’s too much beauty,” Asle thinks as he considers what it would take to paint a pair of snow angels on the ground. “A good picture needs something bad in it in order to shine the way it should, it needs darkness in it.” Should he depict them dissolving as they melt away? Even Asle is unable to commit to this ruinous philosophy of beauty.
The other attraction of The Other Name is the beautiful current of Fosse’s sentences. One of Asle’s many prayers is worth quoting at length, if only to understand the grace of Searls’s translation:
I’m breathing the sorrow in and I can’t breathe it out and I fold my hands and I breathe in deeply and I say to myself inside myself Kyrie and I breathe out slowly and I say eleison and I breathe in deeply and say Christe and I breathe out slowly and say eleison and I say these words again and again and the breaths of the words make it so that I’m not filled with sorrow any more, with fear, with sudden fear, with this sorrow in the fear so strong that’s suddenly come over me and that overpowers me and it’s like it’s made what’s I in me very small, turned it into nothing, but a nothing that’s nonetheless there, lodged firm, unshakable, even clearer in its motionless movement, and I breathe in deeply and I say to myself Kyrie and I breathe out slowly and say eleison…
The prayer goes on. Asle grows calmer as his unbroken thought produces a deep, pulmonary satisfaction. (Fosse has called this expansive style “slow prose,” though he’s loathe to define it.) The vocabulary of Searls’s translation is limited, so that the music of the prose can take precedence in these cascading sentences. The beauty of the prayer above is in the motion of “breath in deeply” and “breath out slowly”. Fosse, like Bernhard, is a master of employing repeated language as a kind of pendulum—count how many times “lying in bed in my purple velvet suit” appears in the opening pages of Melancholy, Fosse’s first novel translated into English—that mimics the swirling eddies of thought. It’s this kinetic energy that makes Fosse compulsively readable by the quality of his sentences alone, regardless of content. Like looking into an Anselm Kiefer landscape, his “slow prose” hums at a barely perceptible decibel.
Fosse is often cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize, though he seems wary of such speculation. “Normally, they give it to very old writers, and there’s a wisdom to that—you receive it when it won’t affect your writing,” he’s said on the subject. After Septology, will he ready for the Nobel? Readers should hope so, if only to see the remainder of his work translated into English. Critics often compare Fosse to Beckett and other choleric titans of literature—Thomas Bernhard and László Kraszhnahorkai, yes, but also Knut Hamsun—a typically male, European cohort whose books are marked by splenetic rants, misanthropes ill-fit for society, spiraling syntax, receding narrators, absurdist volleys of dialogue. But at his core, Fosse is far from misanthropic. He lacks Bernhard’s irony, Krasznahorkai’s obfuscation, or Hamsun’s meanness. Septology even splinters from Beckett’s influence in many ways—a Vladimir or Estragon would remain static, flailing in the absurd, clambering neither deeper into nor out of the void, while Asle seems determined to strive toward salvation. Amidst the suicidal ideation, Asle’s desire to vanish at sea, there are incredible moments of levity in The Other Name—snow angels, light, and a respect for youthful naïvety. As the narrator thinks after a prayer: “Let them laugh, let them, because it helps!”
The English translations of Parts III–V and VI-VII will published over the next two years as I Is Another and A New Name, respectively, in which we can expect Asle to seek an end to his grief, and his doppelgänger a parallel path to salvation. It’s not often that one feels optimistic for a Fosse creation, but the characters of Septology are of a separate echelon: a bit more hopeful, a bit more willing to refuse bitter nihilism. By the end of Part II, Asle decides he wants to celebrate Christmas with Åsleik and his sister to see, for the first time in many years, an amassed collection of his “best smaller paintings,” those that Åsleik has gifted his sister over the years. Asle seems anxious to return to the past in this way, but his contempt for his early paintings is overshadowed by curiosity and a desire to revisit the art that once brought him “a kind of agony.” What is he looking for? we wonder. A nostalgic anesthetic? The domestic happiness that Ales once brought into his life? Did such a happiness ever exist? The answers to these questions could make up the sum of Fosse’s life work. In producing a new painting, Asle thinks, “I have to paint a picture in a way that dissolves the picture lodged inside me and makes it go away, so that it becomes an invisible forgotten part of myself, of my own innermost picture, the picture I am and have…” In a similar way, Septology is on its way to becoming some of Fosse’s most meaningful art, his singular picture finally dislodged.
Spencer Ruchti is an intern at Tin House Books and formerly a bookseller at Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, MA. His writing has appeared in The Adroit Journal, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He lives in Portland, OR.