God, Art and Death in the Same (Very Long) Sentence - The New York Times

THE OTHER NAME: SEPTOLOGY I-II I IS ANOTHER: SEPTOLOGY III-V A NEW NAME: SEPTOLOGY VI-VII By Jon Fosse Translated by Damion Searls When I was a graduate student in Boston in the early 2000s, a priest told me about a devout old man who had prayed only the first word of the Lord’s Prayer for years and years. With awe and even a little reverence, the priest said he could never pray like him, like that. I nodded respectfully but thought the old man must have been spiritually stuck, or maybe showing off a little, a bedazzled believer overcome by just the “Our” of the Our Father. Having read the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse’s “Septology,” an extraordinary seven-novel sequence about an old man’s recursive reckoning with the braided realities of God, art, identity, family life and human life itself, I’ve come into awe and reverence myself for idiosyncratic forms of immense metaphysical fortitude. Fosse is one of those writers you feel guilty you haven’t heard of already, or have vowed to read so

saved by

• Daniel Bashir