Confessions of a researchaholic

November 6, 2023

Septology by Jon Fosse

Filed under: Imaginary — liyiwei @ 6:41 pm
Tags: ,

An aging painter recorded his activities within a few days interleaved with flashbacks and reminiscences of his life and monologues about art, religion, and relationships in a single continuous sentence spanning seven volumes of this fiction.

Several characters in the story, including the writer himself, have doppelgangers with the same name and similar appearances but different life trajectories.
There can be multiple interpretations of this, such as mental confusion and imagined alternative lives as a reflection of the writer who possessed talent in art but deficiency (and regression due to aging and substance abuse) in other mental aspects.

I read volumes I-II (the other name) in an e-book version just to see what the Nobel literature prize is all about, and finished III-V (I is another) and VI-VII (a new name) in audio book versions as I found the audio format perfectly suitable for the continuous verbal style of the story without any visual structure.

A painting titled “St. Andrew’s cross” is repeated mentioned in the story, which I tried to visualize.

https://www.behance.net/gallery/183974007/StAndrewCrossSeptology

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