Briefly Reviewed: September 2024

Septology: Volume I: The Other Name. Volume II: I Is Another. Volume III: A New Name

By Jon Fosse. Translated by Damion Searls

Publisher: Transit Books

Pages: 672

Price: $40

Review Author: Inez Fitzgerald Storck

Jon Fosse, a Norwegian Catholic convert, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in October 2023. The most-produced Norwegian playwright since Henrik Ibsen, he has written, in addition to over 40 plays, numerous novels and other works. Septology, seven books in three volumes published over the past several years and now available as a single collection, is his magnum opus. This novel is of particular interest because religious themes abound in it, from the alternating hiddenness and self-revelation of God to the mystery of good and evil.

Asle, an aging Norwegian painter, recounts in the first person what happens in his life in the weeks before Christmas. Almost as though watching a film, the reader sees him go about the mundane tasks of life, pondering decisions of both no consequence and major import. Frequently, as the minutiae of his life begin to become tedious, a memory suddenly enters the stream-of-consciousness narrative; once accustomed to this technique, the reader understands that Asle has gone back to relive an experience from the past, from as far back as his boyhood and as recent as yesterday. As Asle himself says, “Everything’s kind of run together a bit for me, I think, it’s all a bit mixed up in my mind.” The entire novel is indeed totally run together, as it comprises just one sentence, with nary a period, not even at the end of the book. Fosse’s generous use of conjunctions such as and and but coupled with dialogue serves to break up the flow of words into discrete phrases, doing duty for sentences.

At times, the shifts between present and past become dizzying, with abrupt changes of time and place, one following the other. Yet Asle’s experiences and memories form a whole, which the reader begins to discern while gaining access to the formative events in his life and his evolving plans for the future. Evil visits Asle in the drowning of a boy he knew, sexual abuse at the hands of a pedophile, and the deaths of his young sister, grandmother, and, later in life, his beloved wife, Ales (the similarity to his name is striking), who died early in their marriage. Haunted by death, he is marked by all this, which finds expression in his painting: “There’s often a lot of pain in what I paint, and in me too in a way, because these pictures lodged inside me, yes, they’re almost all connected to something bad that I remember.” Even so, the paintings communicate light, which shines through the darkness, “because it’s in the darkness that God lives, yes, God is darkness…it’s from God’s darkness that the light comes, the invisible light.”

All the major characters in the novel reveal aspects of Asle’s life as he contemplates it during what are, as Fosse implies, the last days of his earthly existence. The most important of these is his Doppelgänger, also named Asle, who resembles him (and Fosse himself), down to his gray ponytail and manner of dressing. The protagonist becomes acquainted with his double, also a painter, and shows continual concern for him. This second Asle, divorced and addicted to drink, shows what the protagonist would have become had he made different choices in life, had he not stopped overindulging in drink, thanks to the influence of his wife, a cradle Catholic who inspired him to convert. One of the narrator’s major concerns is the fate of his double, whom he fortuitously finds collapsed on the street in a drunken stupor and takes to a clinic, from which he is transported to a hospital. The reader becomes privy to the incoherent, disturbed ravings inside the mind of the patient as he hovers between life and death, told in the first person to highlight the identification between the two characters. The subtitles of volumes I and II allude to this identification of the two doubles, The Other Name and I Is Another, the latter a reference from a letter of French poet Arthur Rimbaud.

Some of the most beautiful passages in the novel explore Asle’s spiritual life. He is moved by the Mass and specific prayers, especially the Kyrie, Our Father, and Hail Mary, which he recites at the end of each of the seven books of Septology. Like Fosse, he is inspired by Meister Eckhart, whom Asle frequently quotes, including some of his questionable statements (though Fr. Frederick Copleston in his magisterial A History of Philosophy assures us that these must be placed in context, and that in its totality the corpus of the medieval Dominican mystic’s work is orthodox). Ales, from beyond the grave, accompanies her husband, serving as a spiritual guide.

A major theme in the novel is Asle’s relationship to his painting. Each of the seven books begins with the identical phrase “and I see myself standing and looking at the picture with the two lines,” one purple and one brown, which cross in the middle of the painting, forming a St. Andrew’s cross. At first, Asle can’t bring himself to part with this painting, which becomes an obsession to him. He keeps it for himself, along with other favorites. Then, as the story progresses, he becomes detached from the picture, to the point of wanting to be rid of it and of all his favorites (except the portrait of his wife). He takes them to his art dealer, suggesting that his life’s work is complete.

Asle’s final thoughts resolve memories and worries into prayers in both Latin and the vernacular, the Our Father and the Hail Mary, poignantly interrupted at the words nunc et in hora (“now and at the hour”) as the novel ends. The subtitle of this final volume, A New Name, refers to the new name written on a white stone, given to the faithful in Heaven (cf. Rev. 2:17), one of the indications that Asle enters the next life at the conclusion of the book.

As the novel progresses, the story accelerates, with Asle’s recollections of a greater number of external events that shed light on the past, interspersed with dramatic episodes taking place in the present. Readers who become engrossed in Asle’s complex life and his thoughts about art and religion will appreciate this book, bearing with the repetitive recollections and musings to savor poetic passages of profound insight and poignant beauty, which often burst forth into the narrative.

President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier

By C.W. Goodyear

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Pages: 624

Price: $35

Review Author: Alex Pinelli

No subject in American history is more fitting for the scope of a biography than a U.S. president. The presidency and the man occupying the highest seat in our government have been the focus of scorn and adulation since the inception of the office. Certainly, a wide array of presidents has been deified and villainized, and their lives subjected to speculation and innuendo while in and out of office. At the same time, others within the presidential pantheon seem so unimportant that one may ask if a biographer’s hours, days, months, even years of research, writing, and editing are worth it. Indeed, the average American only with difficulty could differentiate the likenesses of Rutherford B. Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, Grover Cleveland, Chester A. Arthur, and James A. Garfield. Early-20th-century American writer Thomas Wolfe aptly described the perception of these late-19th-century presidents when he wrote how their “gravely vacant and bewhiskered faces mixed, melted, swam together” in the American mind.

But it is precisely biographical writing that can awaken these giants of gilded-age politics in the modern era. In 2022 Troy Senik wrote a riveting sketch of Cleveland in Man of Iron: The Turbulent Life and Improbable Presidency of Grover Cleveland, and historian David Fisher continued his Presidential Chronicles series with a well-written but less popular biography of Harrison. Head and shoulders above both is C.W. Goodyear’s President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier. Goodyear’s vibrant prose and vivid flourishes of style allow the nearly 500 pages of storyline to fly by.

The following excerpt summarizes Garfield’s life and, while rather extensive, provides a glimpse of Goodyear’s style:

The canal boy is baptized; he emerges as a tall, sandy-haired teacher, caning students in a firelit winter classroom; he roams summer roads as a lay preacher; an almond-eyed student passes by, catching his attention; he turns twenty-six and is a married college president — idolized by hundreds of farmers’ children flocking for instruction; he is a state senator, swapping peacetime political capital for a wartime army uniform; he is raring to fight as a civil war engulfs America, telling voters a “government actually based on the monstrous injustice of human slavery” must not be allowed to exist; he leads congregants and students up frigid Kentucky slopes to hunt rebels; a general’s stars bloom on his shoulders — the second-youngest congressman in America at thirty-one and one of its most progressive. Then seventeen years fly by in a paragraph, and he is minority leader of the House — an unassuming, unparalleled survivor of an age’s worth of legislative battles.

Goodyear’s compelling prose notwithstanding, he benefits greatly from having a subject about whom so many know so little yoked with the remarkable and improbable nature of Garfield’s life — the needed prerequisites for a brilliant biography.

Goodyear breaks the book into four sections, and each subsection begins with a Shakespeare quote Garfield jotted down in his personal diary. “The Wilderness” tracks the young Garfield’s escapades throughout Ohio and his early professional career therein. “The War” follows him during his time in the Union Army and illuminates his rise to major general, time under fire, and friendship with his superior William S. Rosecrans. The third section, “The House,” is the longest, and rightly so, as this is where Goodyear delves into the minutiae of Reconstruction congressional politics and brings to light the infighting, failures, and successes, as well as the larger-than-life personalities, within the Republican Party of the era. He wraps it up with “The Presidency.” Goodyear gives Garfield’s term — tragically cut short, lasting only 200 days — an air of respect without lionizing or diminishing his role. He gives a fair amount of attention to Garfield’s assassination, along with the 80 days in which he clung to life after being shot. Alleged medical missteps are chronicled thoroughly in other works (see Murdering a President: Alexander Graham Bell and the Race to Save James Garfield by Fred Rosen and articles in The American Journal of Surgery and The New York Times) but given due diligence here as well.

Garfield might just be the most interesting president you do not remember. Coming from truly humble origins, he was born in a one-room log cabin on the northwestern frontier and personified the Horatio Alger-style rags-to-riches story. Before becoming the only president to go directly from the lower house of Congress to the White House, and the second to be assassinated, Garfield won cases as an attorney before the U.S. Supreme Court, wrote an original proof for the Pythagorean theorem published in New England Journal of Education, penned articles for The Atlantic and The North American Review in his spare time, became the Union Army’s youngest general and the second youngest member of the House of Representatives, preached the Gospel in Ohio’s Western Reserve as a Disciple of Christ, and campaigned in two (English and German) of the four languages (Latin and Greek) in which he was fluent.

Goodyear’s biography is likely to be the definitive work on Garfield for the foreseeable future. That may not mean much to the general populace, but two sizeable benefits await those who read it. One, Garfield’s life is a testament to the American promise. No matter how low the conditions into which one is born, this does not determine one’s future. President Hayes remarked of Garfield that “no man ever started so low who accomplished so much in all our history,” not even Benjamin Franklin or Abraham Lincoln. Second, it provides a positive view of the term radical. Unlike today, when a right- or left-wing radical might call for the overthrow of our government in favor of some egalitarian fantasy or totalitarian hope, Garfield was radical in a way that did not aim to reconfigure the way of our government or tear down our institutional foundations. Rather, as his congressional and presidential record attests, he sought to make changes by working within the bounds of constitutional governance. For example, he aimed to rectify the country’s wrongs by awarding African Americans positions in government when no one else would, giving them land in Confederate areas, and pushing for equal education among the races even if that meant creating a federal education system.

Goodyear points us toward our better instincts through the person of Garfield. He highlights the betterment of self through education and religiosity, and the importance of fidelity to country, geniality among peers, and perseverance to see things through.

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