... a very strange novel, beautifully and movingly strange ... The book sounds, in summary, terrible: pretentious, self-serious, unendurable. This makes it all the more remarkable how wonderful it is. The book evades all those pitfalls to become something quite different from what it might seem, something that, like all great novels, somehow exceeds our prior idea of what a novel is ... With Septology, Fosse has found a new approach to writing fiction, different from what he has written before and—it is strange to say, as the novel enters its fifth century—different from what has been written before. Septology feels new ... While reading Septology, it’s as if it ceases to be a novel at all. I do not mean this in the sense of it being a reaction to received ideas of the novel. There is no whiff of an author making self-important statements about 'the death of character' or 'the hunger for reality.' It’s just that it becomes hard, wonderfully hard, when reading Septology, to think that a novel could be written any other way.
...a style that tends towards torrents of unpunctuated sentences, relentless blasts against conventional syntax and the reader’s patience. Fosse calls this 'slow prose', yet this doesn’t necessarily make for slow reading; you can fight a current, trying to cling to what you know, or you can let go and take the risk of drowning ... This lack of sincerity and self-belief is what, paradoxically, makes Fosse far more sincere than his student Knausgaard, and indeed many an author of confidently narcissistic autofiction. Fosse’s style makes demands on its reader. And at a time when the scope of so many novels has narrowed to what their thinly disguised authors ate for breakfast, Fosse’s belief that writing about mundane details can lead us away from the kitchen table and to the discovery of 'something that silently speaks in and behind the words and sentence' makes his Septology , for all its self-doubt, worth every risk of reading.
... translated into simple, stark and often luminous English by Damion Searls in three volumes, the books feel like the culminating project of an already major career. They bring together [Fosse's] abiding interests in formal experiment and in the making of art and identity, with his heightened interest in deeply felt religious experience.
The sum of the action is Asle’s trip to the city to drop off paintings with his gallerist and visit his namesake. Regularly the narration blends into his memories as a young man leaving home and taking up painting. A haunting sense of doubling recurs, not only with the second Asle but with a lost love named Ales who persists in a ghostly form in his work. What is even more palpable in this book is the way that the writing is meant to replicate the pulse and repetitive phrasing of liturgical prayer ... These unique books ask you to engage with the senses rather than the mind, and their aim is to bring about the momentary dissolution of the self.
Asle is a gentle, somewhat fretful narrator, and Fosse masterfully arranges the strands of the different narratives as they lap against each other and occasionally contradict. The result is meditative and cyclical, yet surprisingly accessible.
