John Neeleman@JohnRNeeleman
#Fosse24 #Septology
My exegesis of Septology (caution, spoilers):
Asle is a good enough painter that he is able to make a living from his artistic works. He remembers a childhood mostly disconnected from his parents and marked by the tragic deaths of two other children, his sister who died suddenly and inexplicably in her sleep and a neighbor boy who drowned. As a youth he found his extraordinary talent for painting which liberated him from the banality of his parents' home.
Alcoholism plagued much of Asle's life, including two marriages that failed, though they produced two children (one from each marriage) now alienated from him. He was unfaithful to his first wife with the woman who would be his second wife. A fourth woman, an illicit lover with medium blonde hair, was a chronic presence, possibly even during his third marriage, to his beloved Ales, who saved and transformed his life.
Finally, and unexpectedly, he met the love of his life, Ales. She would become his third wife. She converted him to Catholicidm and got him to stop drinking. This was the most productive time of his life as a painter. Unfortunately, Ales died of a ravaging disease (cancer?) while they were both fairly young, cutting off their near perfect marriage.
All the subsequent years Asle has been alone, still supporting himself with his painting and with only one friend, a neighbor. He does not return to the illicit lover as he is committed to being faithful to Ales even in her death. Another important figure in his life is the owner of the gallery that shows and sells his paintings. But they only transact business.
Now he is apparently in a hospital, in and out of consciousness, where he spends his final days. The narrator found a friend bearing his same name as his collapsed in the snow, and took him to the hospital, but the fried is Asle, the narrator himself. Asle shows plenty of facility at regarding himself from another's point of view. Indeed, frequently he imagines his younger self times observing his current old self as he drives by his house in a white van or spies on his younger self in a park with Ales (I have called this uber postmodernism).
As Asle spends his final days in the hospital he relives his life in a stream of consciousness. He has much to regret. He was not always the monkish ascetic we meet in the novel. His dreamscape is fractured and populated by absurdities as dreams often are. His subconscious deals with the regrettable parts of his life by transmuting that life into that of another, his "namesake's." He says repeatedly that he doesn't know how to contact his friend Asle's children to tell them their father is dying because he doesn't know where they are. He is talking about himself.
As the novel progresses, the wildly divergent lives of our narrator Asle and his uncannily similar "namesake," who is apparently comatose in the hospital, begin to converge. Septology becomes suspenseful. Yes, somewhat like a thriller. Where is our narrator?! Is he in a frozen stupor staring at the sea, too exhausted to light a fire (from heart disease? Depression? Dementia?) or is he comatose in a hospital bed--in either case reliving his own life and others' lives as a fragmented, jumbled, implausible dreamscape? Timelines do not cohere. Implausibly, disparate characters come and go wearing identical masks--e.g., narrator and his namesake, a former lover of one Asle or the other with mid-length blond hair and the neighbor's sister--and he is present in his namesake's life, possessing the POV--the namesake's two failed marriages, unhappy alienated children, alcoholism and infidelities in contrast to narrator's near perfect yet childless (third) marriage--as though he were him. ... (continued in the reply below)
