Trilogy by Jon Fosse

Earlier this year I read Jon Fosse’s Septology, an absolutely beautiful and heartbreaking masterpiece. So, when I found Trilogy in the Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I felt I had to read it and, while it didn’t quite reach the same highs of Septology, it was still an excellent work that is probably a better entry point to Fosse’s work for the uninitiated and intimidated.

The plot of Trilogy is much more straightforward than that of Fosse’s longer work. Wakefulness, the first book, is about a young couple, Asle and Alida, who are about seventeen years old and who find themselves expecting a child. They have fraught relationships with their families and are seeking somewhere to live, which proves difficult when people see Alida’s swelling stomach. They need to make use of Asle’s deceased father’s boat, but another man with claim to it arrives, preventing them from leaving. Fosse applies a light touch and has Asle kill the man off-page, hiding it from Alida before stealing the boat so that they can escape to Bjørgvin. When they arrive, they expect to find easy boarding, given the higher population and number of houses, though in fact they are continually turned down, first by an old woman, then a young woman, and then others in between. Ultimately, Asle kills once again when they return to the first old woman’s home. They occupy her home and when it is time for Alida to give birth, they discover a core irony, alongside the audience, that Fosse delivers beautifully. A man from town tells Asle where the midwife lives—the home where Asle and Alida are now staying—and so Asle has to lie and say nobody answered. Then, a second midwife needs to be brought in and Asle’s guide is confused when he brings the new midwife to the home of the old midwife. Asle and Alida then have their child, Sigvald.

In Olav’s Dream, the second part of Trilogy, Fosse continues the story in a mostly linear timeline following the previous book’s events. Olav’s Dream is probably the most interesting part of the three. It begins with the revelation that Asle and Alida are now going by the names Olav and Åsta. Alida seems to go along somewhat blindly to the plan, which is odd given that she supposedly is unaware of Asle’s murders. In any case, Asle / Olav is clearly haunted by guilt and is aware that they could be caught at any moment. The tension of the book escalates when an old man starts following Olav, calling him Asle, implying that he knows what he has done and is ready to expose him. Meanwhile, Olav sees a man who has purchased a beautiful yellow and blue bracelet and he decides he needs to buy one for Alida. The old man asks Asle to buy him a drink, essentially blackmailing him into silence, but Asle ignores him, refusing to accept his name. Instead, the man guides him to where he can buy the same bracelet. He is successful in getting the bracelet, but ultimately loses it when he is intercepted and drawn before a court, tried for multiple murders, and executed on the spot.

The third section, Weariness, peters out somewhat. In Olav’s Dream, Alida expresses deep concern that Asle will not come back. She has a terrible premonition which comes true; it’s a parallel to her father, who also disappeared. In Weariness, we find that she is alone with Sigvald. When she goes looking for Asle, she hears for the first time that he is deceased. She then finds a yellow and blue bracelet—the same that Asle had purchased—and immediately knows that it is a gift to her from Asle. It solidifies their connection across time and space and the border of life. Then, Alida meets a man who offers her a place to stay in exchange for her being a servant to him. She debates before agreeing and the novel ends with their journey to his home.

While the story is straightforward, what shines in Fosse’s work is his style. There’s repetitiousness in the phrasing that gives the work a beautiful cadence. It also elevates the doubling that happens throughout the book—doubling of names, doubling of crimes, doubling of circumstances (like Asle and Alida’s father both disappearing), doubling the bracelet, doubling a fiddle, and so on. Conceptually, the work is delivered immaculately.

Actually, to return to Olav’s Dream for a moment, there’s a moment of doubling that is presented with such a sinister tone. In the first book, Asle and Alida seek shelter in the home of a young girl. She returns in the second part, recognizing Asle and attempting to seduce him in front of her mother; she exposes herself to him and tries to coax him into staying. The way she returns and tries to draw Asle away that turns the screw to make her all the more villainous and foreboding, especially because the old man is already there as a threat, as well.

In fact, the section Olav’s Dream works so well because there is a kind of dream logic that governs it. There’s no explanation for why the old man knows who Asle is. The timeline becomes somewhat fraught, given that the young woman from earlier returns now, seemingly as an adult. The fact that Asle is brought before a jury and executed within a few pages—it’s a Kafkaesque collapse of time. It’s hard, actually, to identify what part of Olav’s Dream is a dream. The old man seems to be the kind of figure that emerges in our dreams to haunt us, appearing out of nowhere. There’s a kind of dream logic where the repetitiousness just sort of works out. Asle meets the old man, goes and buys a bracelet, and returns and finds that the old man is still there, begging for a drink. Even the fact that the main characters have new names seems to emulate that experience I’m confident we’ve all had where we’re in a dream and “it was me but not me” and “you were you, but didn’t look like you.” It’s these strange essences that seem to percolate throughout the entire text so much that it appears to be entirely a dream or entirely real—and perhaps the word “dream” of the title is Olav’s ambition to get Alida a bracelet to marry her in spirit.

Fosse’s lack of punctuation and narrational style also contribute to the surreality of the text. I’ll point to a moment in the dialogue where the use of pronouns conflates identities and confuses sense in a way that allows a singular text to expand in ambiguous registers. Here’s the moment when Asle responds to the old man’s taunting:

My name isn’t Asle, Olav says

and he hears the Old Man saying that no, no it isn’t, of course his name isn’t Asle, he says
No my name is Olav, Olav says
So your name’s Olav, the Old Man says
Olav, yes, Olav says
Yes Olav’s my name too, the Old Man says
I’m the one who’s called Olav, not you, he says
and he holds up his tankard to Olav
Me, he says
Yes, Olav says (74)

The reason I find this so compelling is because Fosse does not rely on standard patterns of dialogue, so it confuses and doubles identities. The narrator states that Olav says his name isn’t Asle, giving credence to the idea that he is literally Olav. The first few lines of dialogue here seem to go back and forth, but when the Old Man reveals that his name is Olav too, it forces us to re-read “Olav, yes, Olav says” immediately before: which Olav do we have here? Also, notice how Fosse forces us into a non-linear reading; the future revises the past. But, when we get to the line “I’m the one who’s called Olav, not you, he says”---who is the “he” of this sentence? Is it the Old Man reasserting that he knows Asle is not named Olav? Is it Olav accusing the man of lying? I’m tempted towards the former, especially because of the “and” of the “and he holds up his tankard to Olav.” Then, “Me, he says” and “Yes, Olav says” seems to be an admission of sorts—unless it’s a repetition. Perhaps all four of those final lines cited above are all about the Old Man.

It’s those kinds of ambiguities I find so exciting in Fosse’s work in general. Further, there’s a circularity that comes about in his work. For instance, in Weariness, we get this passage, now being focalized through Alida’s daughter, who seems to have seen her ghost:

it was as if everyone really wanted to tell her what kind of man her mother had been with, and what was true and not true of what they told her was difficult to tell, of course, for they talked about Asle in Dylgja, that he was a fiddler, like his father before him, that he had taken her mother by brute force and gotten her pregnant, although she was only a chid herself, and that he had taken her with him after first having taken the life of her mother, that is, her own grandmother, that’s what they said, but if that were true, no nobody knew, that’s what they said, but if that were true, no nobody knew, and no it couldn’t be like that, it was probably just the sort of thing people made up and talked about, Ales thought, and then, they said, the gossippers said, he strangled a person of his own age so he could steal his boat, that was supposed to have happened at the boathouse where his father had lived, in Dylgja, and then, in Bjorgvin, he’s supposed to have strangled several others before he was caught and hanged, that’s what they said, but it couldn’t be true, her mother, Alida, could never have been with a man like that, a brute like that, never in this world [...] (128)

In this passage, there is another review of some of the similarities in the central characters’ lives. It’s as though there’s a fatedness to their existences that is handed down. What is also notable is that Asle struggles with the storytelling practices that give her access, or perhaps don’t, to truth. The boundary between true and untrue “was difficult to tell.” Some of the details seem to be confirmed by the narrator—Asle was a fiddler, as was his dad. Other details seem more questionable; the narrator does not specifically say that Asle took Alida by force, and Alida’s own inner monologues seem to suggest a genuine love. The fact that there are “gossippers” that tell the awful stories about Asle is intriguing, particularly because the murders happen “off-stage,” as it were. Asle says he is going out and comes back wet, probably having killed the man with the boat. Asle tells Alida to go into a room and she picks out and sees his hand covering an old woman’s mouth. These synecdoches seem straightforward enough, but there is no certainty when the narrator refuses to actually show the violence directly.

When Ales imagines her mother, Alida, in the home she now resides, she can picture all of the furniture and the kitchen set up, and so on. There’s a sneaky line that seems to resonate beyond itself in that narration. Ales’ narration states, “that, that’s so long ago, something that doesn’t exist, something that has never really existed even if it has and Little Sister lying there so pale and gone and never will her pale face, her open mouth, her half-open eyes, disappear for her, she will always see it, because Little Sister became ill and died and everything went so fast” (127). Fosse deals with time in a compelling way, as I tried to outline above, where things that are in the past might as well not have existed—so much so that it is “something that has never really existed even if it has” (127). That single line is so evocative for assessing the narration of the text. It points to that obscure boundary between truth and falsehood. The coincidences and resonances between space and time never really existed, even if they had. It’s an intangible uncertainty toward what exists and yet doesn’t. There’s a coincidence about Alida finding the bracelet as a gift from Asle, for example, and yet it is precisely what it was intended for—it both is and isn’t what was and wasn’t.

I fear at this point I’m beginning to spiral into conjecture of some kind of extranarrative truth that devolves into ambiguity. Trying to put it together logically is not likely to be successful, though Trilogy remains less obscure than Septology, but the ambiguity is productive and engaging in its own right. Jon Fosse’s book is wonderful. There is so much to talk about and it would be well worth studying the book in-depth. While it lacks some of Septology’s emotional core, the focus on plotting a story is an interesting shift to witness. I imagine this text will resonate with more people and I definitely encourage you to read it.

Happy reading!