A New Name: Septology VI-VII

"Well, we’re never specifically told they are doppelgängers, although the reader is at liberty to believe that this is true. It tells the story of two men, both artists, with very similar names—the same letters arranged slightly differently. Both have been married to women with similar names, and both live in the same fictional town in Norway. They know each other, but their career paths have been very different. One has been a very successful artist, his life has been as successful as it could have been. He lost his wife—she died—but they stayed together, loved each other, and so on. He has had enormous fulfilment from his work. The other has had a fractured relationship with his wife and his artistic career has not been successful. So, yes, many people think of them as doppelgängers, of the book as a single life as it might have been lived twice over. But actually, the Septology as a whole, and A New Name in particular, is an extraordinary meditation on art and love, and the possibility of eternity. Each of the individual sections in the book is a single sentence. Those sentences have an incantatory feel to them. There is a lot of repetition, a lot of repeated images, repeated sections. It has an extraordinary hypnotic quality. Frequently, the reader will shift from being inside the mind of character A to character B and it will take a moment before you realise it, but that’s entirely deliberate. Damion Searls learned Norwegian specifically so that he could translate Jon Fosse . He previously read his work in German, and was so taken with it that he decided to learn Norwegian himself to translate the books. I can completely understand this. The prose is luminous. It’s like swimming in an open sea. You can’t see land in any direction. You aren’t trying to. You have no frame of reference as to where you are. You are simply here, and must deal with the waves as they come. It’s a reading experience unlike anything else I’ve come across in the last several years, and an extraordinary meditation on human mortality and human endeavour, what we do with our lives, what we don’t do, what we may regret, what we may invest ourselves in—in terms of our art or whatever it is. This is a quiet book that nonetheless encompasses pretty much all human existence. It’s as vast in its scope as Tomb of Sand , but completely different in as much as lots of things happen in Tomb of Sand— or lots of things have happened in its past—and it is bright and chirpy and noisy, whereas A New Name and the rest of Fosse’s Septology is closer to Thomas Tallis’s Spem in alium , a forty-voice motet that moves sinuously, slowly and beautifully. And every time you listen to it, you find greater depths within. I suppose it is challenging. I mean, you pick up books because you hope to be engaged by them. I think anyone prepared to give the Septology an hour of their time will have by then made a decision as to whether or not they wish to continue. You simply have to let yourself go. I remember a few years ago being told that Anna Burns’s Milkman was challenging. Well, not if you come from Ireland, I thought. People said the same thing about Lisa McInerney’s The Glorious Heresies . But as long as you read it with a Cork accent, you know, it makes perfect sense. I don’t agree with this notion that books are either, you know, complicated or uncomplicated. There are books that are deceptively simple. Look at the work of Annie Ernaux, for example, or Patrick Modiano, people would say they have a simple and accessible style. But actually, I think both are writers of great profundity and depth, who use a pared-down style in a very specific way. I worry about readers afraid of digressions and run-on sentences – how do they cope with Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, a character who isn’t born until about page 300 of the novel in which he is the protagonist? Reading isn’t like taking a test. You shouldn’t go into it thinking, ‘is it going to be easy or hard?’ You’re not going to be asked questions at the end of it, you go in for the experience of reading. The Septology is very different from most of what you will read, but that’s equally true of Tomb of Sand , just in terms of how it uses voice. But I found the Septology compulsively readable. I think stopping and wondering at what’s happening is to miss the point. This is a river flowing, and you flow with it. Absolutely. Some people will look at a dense block of text and think ‘this will be difficult to read’, but find the voice within the novel and follow it, and you might suddenly find that it is wonderful. Or you might not. But if you think of fiction as something that have specific rules —that it should have a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, or that it should be written in delimited sentences, or that it the dialogue must be marked off in inverted commas or whatever— you’re limiting what you’re going to be doing. When people talk about post-modernism now, I say, well, how different is 20th century post-modernism to the second volume of Don Quixote —the first novel written in a European language—where you have Don Quixote speaking directly to camera, so to speak—a long time before cameras were invented. He’s reading the second volume of Don Quixote , written by someone else, and complaining about what we might call copyright, though that’s not been invented yet. It has many of the tropes of what we call postmodernism, but it was written 300 years before modernism!"