The night Septology starts, it’s Advent, and Dylgja gets hit with the season’s first snow. He spends the seven days, over the seven volumes leading up to Christmas day, deciding. Only this year he thinks he might accept Åsleik’s invitation to Christmas dinner at Sister’s. And every year, Asle declines, choosing to spend it alone, in his house he got with Ales, since “even if Ales has been dead a long time she’s still there in the house.” Each volume starts with Asle contemplating a painting he’s just painted, a blank canvas with two strokes forming a cross each volume ends with Asle praying the rosary.Įvery Christmas, Åsleik invites him over to his sister’s house for Christmas dinner. ![]() His social circle is limited to Åsleik, his neighbor and friend Beyer, the gallerist who shows his paintings and Ales, his long-deceased wife, with whom he still speaks every day. He lives alone, doesn’t drink or smoke, and is a practicing Catholic. Septology follows Asle, an aging painter and widower living in Dylgja, on Norway’s western coast, as he prepares for his annual Christmas exhibit in the nearby town Bjørgvin. That it would serve as a guidebook, a religious text, a light over the darkest week of the year. I had no idea, at the time, how intensely Septology, his recent seven-volume epic, set over the seven days leading up to Christmas-the same seven days, in the liturgical calendar, as it so happened, that I’d end up reading it-would hit me. ![]() In December, I attended a traditional Norwegian brunch and live stream of Fosse’s Nobel lecture at the Norwegian consul general’s residence in New York City.Īt the time, I’d only read Melancholy, Fosse’s 1995 novel about a grandiose and possibly ephebophilic painter who ends up in the asylum. ![]() This past fall, Jon Fosse won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Hans Gude, From the western Coast of Norway, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |