Year Zero by Brian Henderson

Brian Henderson is a Canadian poet that was a big inspiration to me in the early years of me seriously writing any poetry and it’s kind of scary to me to think that the last time I read his work was over a decade ago. I read his collections Sharawadji and Nerve Language, and this time around I’ve jumped to one of Henderson’s mid-career collections, Year Zero. One of the things I’ve found inspiring in Henderson’s poetry collections is their unconventional nature; one of the first poems of his that I read is presented, essentially, as two poems in a side-by-side conversation and I remember seeing him as an experimenter to follow.

Year Zero is perhaps not as experimental as some of Henderson’s later works, but still had quite a bit to latch onto in terms of imagery and insight. There’s a metaphysical bent to a number of the poems that finds meaning in the environment. In the opening poem, “Shadow Lake,” Henderson describes in a brief ten lines, a dark lake: “That lake / with its language of swallowed things” (11). This idea of a lake swallowing detritus and making it a language, communicating through that which it absorbs rather than what it expels is an interesting inversion. It also evokes a mournful tone in its final stanza: “The air is rich with unfinishedness // Things want to be free / impossibly / without having to be lost” (11). The meditative register presents a compelling juxtaposition. The incomplete is presented as richness—it makes me think of Karl Jaspers’ existential philosophy that posits possibility as the ultimate identity of something. Here, what is absent is what gives the air its richness. But Henderson also highlights a depressing reality: that being free entails also being lost; the liberatory and the elegiac operate in tandem.

I think it’s worth noting just how many of these poems are written in dedication. Indeed, the afterword of the text orbits a number of deaths. Henderson describes the manuscript not as an elegy but instead “cut glass, folding water, streaming wind” (59). He goes on to describe the complications of dedicating the book to particular people before noting that he “felt how impossible even multiple dedications were, since the relationships were of such differing textures” (59). He notes that the dedications would “all be cracking off in different directions, felt wrong, and would overburden the book, like a tombstone even though, perhaps even especially because, they are at the heart of it—not their names, but them” (59). This sadness, this sense of loss, does seem to permeate through the text.

“In the Old Garden,” for example, begins with the lines “You have hardly begun the poem /  the voice says, and yet /  many people have already died” (14). There’s a tension in the need for immediacy—if we don’t write it now, it means more people will die. At the same time, there’s a richness and endlessness to the work: “We open even a word like a book / I try to say” (14). If every word is a book, then every book is infinite. The line continues, though into a kind of futility: “but how does this help, / when in the living / every lit vein runs to the golden stigmas of the heart” (14). The reflective poem continues with the idea that the body and the word are connected and “Perhaps the only real word is /  the one the body speaks /  as a whole life” (14). We see Henderson grappling with existential and linguistic themes here, as elsewhere, and it does seem to speak in the writerly register I find so resonant.

Throughout the collection, we also see a return to the idea of the incomplete, the unfinished. As in the first poem where the air is rich with unfinishedness, “There is a Kind of Music” also connects to the idea: “There is a kind of music / an unfinished music / to this constantly moving house / an opening and closing of breath / like a tide of shadows” (29). The piece once more gestures towards a spaciousness and emptiness filled with something not quite done. The unfinished music acts as a kind of furniture. The emphasis for the speaker of the poem is placed on listening for the house’s noises “and on not hearing it” (29). The poem becomes even more existential, referencing the idea of “Death [as] a stagger in the rhythm” (29). The stanzas then speed through a life and “We come all this way to lose ourselves finally / and it’s family we find ourselves doing it in” (29). The poem becomes another meditation on language, “another language / an island the music moves / sweeps as if it had hands / and nearly comforts” (29). There’s a tension here between the power and futility of language. At the same time that language can sweep things away, it only “nearly comforts” — there’s an incompleteness even in this edifying feature of the human experience.

I have to admit that a number of Henderson’s poems are difficult to parse. They are expansive in their scope and, sometimes, it is hard to see how the pieces are connected. The focus is not as immediately obvious as some more imagistic poems. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy them, but it’s clear that to fully appreciate these poems, it requires time and patience.

That said, Henderson does not shy away from the imagistic. For example, the poem “The Hummingbird” is replete with specific images. The poem starts with the idea that “green lanterns of leaves cling / to their lifelines, / ragged with storm light” (45). Meanwhile, “The lake crashes over / lake-made dykes of the marsh / slewing sand / back over blades of yellow iris” (45). The scene unfolds in more rich detail, slowly introducing characters, an ambiguous ‘you’ and an ambiguous ‘I.’ ‘You’ is described as being undermined like the water maple by “incremental dynamite of surf” and toppling into the wet lap of a green torch being thrown away in slow motion. The ‘I’ of the poem reflects: “I have nothing if not this / forever unravelling shore” (45). I love that line because I love boundaries blurring and here the unravelling shore presents an image of flux, the “line between water and water” (45). This is the foundation for where the speaker stands. That image of tumult and instability and excess feels like an appropriate image for capturing a state of mind, consistent with how the speaker is “no longer sure / what direction forward represents” (45). Meanwhile, nature has a way: “Maple fruit torque through the wind, / propellers of future raining down” (45). I like that image; it brings back a childhood memory of watching the maple keys drift, but here the image is inverted as reflective of the future.

“Earth Ward” cycles through a number of these key motifs, as well. The poem starts with the idea of the “unfinished,” this time in the form of an unfinished “centre [that] still gathers / to scatter” (49). Henderson again returns to the idea of the incomplete and the unstable. I love the onomatopoeiac line that follows: “Bees unzip the tropic of afternoon” (49). It evokes Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming”—the center gathers to scatter, everything is unfinished, the world is being unzipped, coming apart. The poem then goes on to describe the “weaving heat lines” and “the ear thinks space” (49). It’s an image of summer and that sensory confusion of wavy lines on the road and the buzzsaw of summer. The poem later takes an odd turn where it is August and the speaker is “listening, listening / at the door of your house, / my ear to taut skin” (49). It suggests the house to be a living entity (indeed, Henderson describes “your human hearth”) but then once again shifts to the idea of an ear on “the wild of the heart” (49) and describes thinking as growing like a bud into wood into bone. This growth and solidifying of thinking is personified through naturalistic imagery. Like in some of the other poems I see as representative, there’s an insertion and identification of the speaker with a natural phenomenon.

This summer poem stands in contrast with a cold one: “February: Flash Point.” The role of memory is once again foregrounded: “the air / a continuous flash that forgets / everything it once knew” (44). The emptiness in the air is this time a more active forgetting. February is presented as a time of transformation: a forgetting of the old, and “like weather, you move over within yourself, / an adoration, and disown the / shapes you blow through” (44). I feel like I calcify throughout winter, so it’s interesting to suggest a freshness and newness in the height of a frozen season. Henderson continues, “You are gestating incandescence / whose shadow shortens / to that telling moment I can tell and / tell, and say nothing of” (44). I’m not quite sure how to process these lines. The idea of an incandescence growing inside sounds like an optimistic shift within the self. That said, “whose shadow shortens” reads ambiguously to me. The incandescence and the shadow seem to be in tension with one another. Like other references to language, the ‘I’ of the poem suggests additional telling and telling—more words—and yet “say nothing of” implies an inability to communicate. Ultimately, there is “strewing the ash of snow, a drift of selves / in the tiny creases of your landscape” (44). I love that idea of a number of selves drifting together. Especially when considering the uniqueness of snowflakes, here there is the suggestion that they are all components of a similar self. It’s a collective identity and “you are filled to your season / with others” (44). The image of snow drifting together and blending feels authentic to who we are as people: collective selves loosely linked together, and the poem leads to an engaging final two lines. We are filled to our seasons with others “welcoming us to the eye / of the blizzard” (44). This amalgamation is a lovely end to the piece, an optimism about what I consider the cruellest month.

Ultimately, Henderson’s poems are rich with perspective and layered with meaning. His core themes engage me: language, space, emptiness, change, amorphousness. There are a handful of poems that I felt I could latch onto, though I admit I was hoping for some more experimental pieces. These are all poems that take time. It’s not the easily accessible work of some other modern poets; it’s the work of someone thinking deeply and considering carefully how these words can create meaning or gesture beyond themselves. As readers, we have to consider his words just as carefully in order to latch on. Year Zero is a reminder that poetry is at its best when it’s slow.

Happy slow reading!

Discontent by Beatriz Serrano

  This review is a hard one. I think Discontent by Beatriz Serrano captures a very specific experience and distinct voice. Specifically, the novel’s protagonist Marisa embodies the directionless ennui of modern corporate life. She’s a marketing creative crushed by the lifelessness of the workplace and is cynical about all of her coworkers and the whole “being employed” thing. She has Master’s students that look up to her, from whom she pilfers ideas and treats with disdain as they scramble for scraps of praise. She skips out for hours at lunch time to go to museums. She dreads the company retreat and greens out in order to avoid a team-building paintball game.

Serrano’s writing is competent. Other than some suspension of disbelief issues towards the end and a couple of structural issues, I don’t have any major issues with the writing itself. It’s descriptive and it’s tonally consistent. The dialogue rings as plausibly true. There’s a sarcasm to the narrator’s voice that delivers some engaging quips, my favourite of which being a reflection on a Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights: “Bosch is off somewhere fucking a hydrangea, and I’m checking my work e-mail” (26). The main character is irreverent and potentially likeable.

Here’s my issue, though: it’s hard to elevate corporate ennui into an edifying artistic experience. Marisa is relatable, but her experiences aren’t particularly distinct. She goes home and watches YouTube videos while she eats dinner; she tweets and retweets causes she supports and overthinks her online presence; she has friends with whom she falls out of touch and then creeps on social medial; she has a neighbour with whom she has sex and has an unspoken intimacy; she does as little as possible for work and has that kind of existential ennui over major life decisions. The trouble with writing something so true-to-life is that it leaves the question: is this kind of existence worthy of being art? Serrano describes YouTube videos that I’ve seen; do I need to watch a fictional character watch a YouTube video? Does that just replicate my own boredom and doomscrolling? A similar issue that plagues the works of Douglas Coupland: it is so referential, so allusive, so intense in its pursuit of realism that it keeps me rooted in the banality of the world and runs the risk of getting dated quickly.

The novel is more or less a series of vignettes, loosely tied together with the looming work conference. One chapter is devoted to Marisa’s trip to the Bosch exhibit. One chapter outlines her relationship with her neighbour and their intimate routines. One chapter sees Marisa encounter an old friend with whom she’d fallen out of touch; the two immediately reconnect and have a drunken night on the town that actually establishes one of the book’s few tender moments. Marisa’s friend Elena serves as an interesting contrast to her. Elena has constructed a new self, while Marisa feels trapped. Elena has the freedom to pursue art, essentially by getting a boob job and playing up her sexuality to get men to pay for her life, while Marisa is floundering creatively. 

Marisa’s encounter with Elena compels her to finally open a box of artifacts left behind following the likely suicide of her coworker Rita. That’s another thread that runs throughout the book: this spectre of Rita. Marisa describes a connection with this other cynical employee, who looms as what Marisa might become. When Marisa opens the box, it’s revealed that Rita had a notebook on which she made artistic renderings of her coworkers, including one that doesn’t seem particularly flattering of Marisa. I’m not sure the payoff really happens for that—but also, I suppose that’s like life; sometimes we’re adrift and there isn’t really much of a narrative payoff.

That being said, the book does have a narrative culmination at the work retreat. Serrano really takes Marisa in a dark direction at the climax. At the best of times, Marisa isn’t particularly likable and this is where the book really took a turn for me. Marisa has a quick hookup with a paintball employee. Okay, whatever, I guess her and her boyfriend aren’t official. Then, she’s put on the spot to deliver a presentation about creativity. In a panic, Marisa decides that her plan is to drug all of her coworkers. She mixes MDMA into all of their lemonade and not only did it make her irredeemably insufferable to me, but it also stretched the limits of the plausibility. Would a generally normal but disaffected employee go that far?

That takes us through the first section of the book, which struck me as a surprise because we only had 20 pages left to go. This is where the structural problem emerges for me a little bit. Section two is about 15 pages. Section 3 is about 7 pages. This might come back to the ‘true-to-life’ aspect of the book; we have loose threads, tacked on vignettes, little experiments.

Even so, the second section of the book is actually kind of fun, if implausible. It’s a series of e-mails sent by the company to its different teams. As it turns out, someone who got drugged had to be hospitalized, and now there’s an investigation. The e-mails discussing the specifics keeps popping up and Marisa’s out of office autoresponse keeps popping up. It’s kind of funny because the conversation then also brings up the discussion of taking Marisa off the e-mail so that her out of office e-mail stops coming through.

The final section is an epilogue of sorts. It’s a description of what happened to Marisa when she returned from her vacation. I won’t spoil the specifics, but something pretty horrific happens. There was a set-up for it, so it feels like a reasonable payoff, but it comes across maybe more comedic or lighthearted than I was prepared for it to be. It rings a little false; the closing lines, in particular, offer a saccharine and overly clean reflection that makes all of our boredom and existential doubt seem trivial. Marisa narrates. “I’ve figured it out. In the end, all we need in life is someone who loves us, a bed with nice big pillows, a  few cans of cold beer, and tomatoes that still taste like something” (177). It seems like Marisa reverts to conventionality—a response to the horror of banal routines that itself lacks imagination. The ending just doesn’t quite hit.

Overall, I didn’t mind Discontent. It’s worth a quick read, but I’m not sure it really elevates our boring everyday lives into something more worthwhile. I’ve read some conflicting views on this one; some people praise the humour and relatability of the book and how perfect it is for describing corporate life. Others have a much more negative view of Marisa and the tone of the text. Let’s just say it’s messy.

Happy reading!

The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante

        [Editor’s note: I actually missed the Ferrante book club, so oops.] Three months ago, I read The Wall by Marlen Haushofer as a book club novel for Type in Toronto. In the latest installment of book club, we’re taking a look at The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante, another book where a woman is blindsided into isolation and must care for dependents with an increasing level of frustration. It seems that Type has a type. But I’m underselling it for comedic effect. The Days of Abandonment is a challenging, existential work about relationships, responsibilities, and selfhood. 

The book opens with Olga’s husband leaving her, seemingly spontaneously, after years of marriage. This sends Olga into a spiral of obsession and rage, especially when she discovers that her husband has left her for an inappropriately younger woman. She engages in rash behaviours, all the while fearing that she is descending into a misanthropic trope she witnessed in her childhood: the poverella, who was similarly abandoned and similarly acted erratically. Now that she is in a similar position, Olga finds herself unable but to attack her husband when she sees him in public and engage in a sordid and failed sexual encounter with her neighbour, whom she hates. Meanwhile, her dog and her son are incredibly sick, much to her annoyance, and her daughter offers her intense judgment while she dissociates to the point of needing her daughter to stab her to bring her back to reality. The group of them gets locked in their apartment and the book spirals into a frenetic madness. 

Plot-wise, the book is pretty thin. Depth-wise, it’s incredibly rich. It’s a finely wrought exploration of the psychological dynamics of identity, relationships, time, and existence. I ended up documenting a number of passages from the text, and, admittedly, I’m about as chaotic in my notetaking as Ferrante’s narrator is in her actions.

The initial pull of the book is the secrecy in which the abandonment is shrouded. There is a history of her husband trying to end the relationship and so Olga has a level of doubt that he may return. Upon reflecting about a previous attempt for him to end the relationship, she notes, “five days later he telephoned me in embarrassment, justified himself, said that there had come upon him a sudden absence of sense” (10), and says that “the phrase made an impression” about lingered with her. The question of whether he will come back lingers and, as she gets into increasingly desperate attempts to get in touch with him, it builds towards the conversation of whether there’s another woman. He says there is, but for a reader, I found there was that little bit of doubt: is he lying about a paramour because it’s the easiest way to make a clean break?

Of course, it is eventually confirmed that Mario is indeed seeing another woman and is not coming back. Olga gets more paranoiac, more obsessive. It’s uncomfortable to observe, but the book challenges its readers by presenting a feminine version of the male messiness at which nobody blinks. The vulgarity of her speech, the crassness of her comments, the repetitiousness in her thought patterns are all recognizable—in someone like Henry Miller. Olga notes that as a girl she “had liked obscene language, it gave [her] a sense of masculine freedom” (22). She continues, “Now I knew that obscenity could raise sparks of madness if it came from a mouth as controlled as mine” (22).

Indeed, Ferrante’s novel offers a kind of metacommentary on the literary history of the rejected woman. Her narrator describes being given a book and reading it, “But when [she] gave her back the volume, [she] made an arrogant statement: these women are stupid. Cultured women, in comfortable circumstances, they broke like knick-knacks in the hands of their straying men. They seemed sentimental fools” (21). Olga’s narration continues, “I wanted to be different, I wanted to write stories about women with resources, women of invincible stories about women with resources, women of invincible words, not a manual for the abandoned wife with her lost love at the top of her thoughts” (21). Her writing philosophy opens the door for the very messiness (that is, complexity) of human emotion: “I had pretensions. I didn’t like the impenetrable page, like a lowered blind. I liked light, air between the slats. I wanted to write stories full of breezes, of filtered rays where dust motes danced. And then I loved the writers who made you look through every line, to gaze downward and feel the vertigo of the depths, the blackness of inferno” (21). When childhood Olga tells her teacher that, her reaction suggests that she lost someone and it is only twenty years later that she suspects the same thing is happening to her. The passage continues with repetitive disbelief: how could Mario leave? How could he “become uninterested in [her] life, like a plant watered for years that is abruptly allowed to die of drought” (21). 

Olga obsesses over the past. Now that her marriage has collapsed, she sees herself in her distraught elementary school teacher; she sees herself in the poverella; she sees herself in the novel she had so abhorred: “Of that book from my adolescence the few sentences I had memorized at the time came to mind: I am clean I am true I am playing with my cards on the table” (22). She reflects, though, that “those were affirmations of derailment” (22). Again, Ferrante offers a hint to the style of obsessive rejection: “I had better remember, always put in the commas. A person who utters such words has already crossed the line, feels the need for self-exaltation and therefore approaches confusion” (22). There are several other moments in the text in which she recalls the need for commas, the lack of which point towards her increasing deterioration (“Hold the commas, hold the periods. It’s not easy to go from the happy serenity of a romantic stroll to the chaos, to the incoherence of the world” (70)).

Throughout the entire book, there’s a divide between what Olga rationally knows against the unfathomability of being left. On the one hand, she admits, “I was ashamed of myself” (34) while on the other she “couldn’t do anything about it” (34). Her desperation leads to a self-destructiveness, hoping that in performing her inability to exist without Mario that it will lure him back. She notes, “I couldn’t think of anything except how to get him back I soon developed an obsession to see him, tell him what I could no longer manage, show him how diminished I was without him” (34). It’s a psychologically complex response in which she attempts to align their different conceptions of reality: “I was sure that, stricken by a kind of blindness, he had lost the capacity to place me and the children in our true situation and imagined that we continued to live as we always had, peacefully. Maybe he even thought we were a little relieved, because finally I didn’t have to worry about him, and the children didn’t have to fear his authority, and so Gianni was no longer reprimanded if he hit Ilaria and Illaria was no longer reprimanded if she tormented her brother, and we all lived—we on one side, he on the other—happily” (34-35). She wants to try to force Mario’s perception, which is such a limited point of view and yet feels completely plausible in the context of loss: “I hoped that if he could see us, if he knew about the state of the house, if he could follow for a single day our life as it had become—disorderly, anxious, taut as a wire digging into the flesh—if he could read my letters and understand the serious work I was doing to sort out the breakdown of our relationship, he would immediately be persuaded to return to his family” (35).

At this point, you may be noticing how much of Ferrante’s text is being reproduced here in full. There are a few reasons for that. First, I think that Ferrante’s prose is compelling since it so accurately captures the desperation of her character. The skewed logic, the lapse in clear-thinking (which harkens back to what Mario had said to her). The other reason I want to replicate Ferrante’s words faithfully here is because the excess in Olga’s speech is, I think, critical to the work.

I mentioned Olga’s parallel to her husband. Mario claims a “sudden absence of sense” (10). That becomes an underlying apothegm for the novel. She has lost her sense and the novel offers a glorious conclusion to the throughline. When Olga is able to meet her husband on a level playing field, she admits that she no longer loves him. He makes some assumptions, which Olga then corrects: “I don’t love you anymore because, to justify yourself, you said that you had fallen into a void, an absence of sense, and it wasn’t true” (185). When her husband says it was true, she again corrects him: “No. Now I know what an absence of sense is and what happens if you manage to get back to the surface from it. You, you don’t know. At most you glanced down, you got frightened, and you plugged up the hole with Carla’s body” (185). I love the way these lines simultaneously offer a visceral response (“plugged up the hole with Carla’s body”) and an existential one. She confronts the depths of her own sorrow and disassociation from herself head-on, leaning into the isolation rather than trying to overcome her loneliness with other men—although there is one scene, where…well…

But more importantly, the novel confronts the relationship of Olga—and women in general—to time. Again, it becomes a kind of inversion between Mario and Olga. She remembers a conversation they had and narrates it as follows:

I don’t know exactly what he said. If I have to be honest, I think that he mentioned only the fact that, when you live with someone, sleep in the same bed, the body of the other becomes like a clock, ‘a meter,’ he said—he used just that expression—‘a meter of life, which runs along leaving a wake of anguish.’ But I had the impression that he wanted to say something else, certainly I understood more than what he actually said, and with an increasing, calculated vulgarity that first he tried to repress and which then silenced him I hissed:

‘You mean that I brought you anguish? You mean that sleeping with me you felt yourself growing old? You measured death by my ass, by how once it was firm and what it is now? Is that what you mean?’ (40)

Ferrante illustrates the way women embody time. I’ve seen a number of novels and philosophers which suggest that women have a deeper connection to time (whether it be through the notion of a ‘biological clock’ or something more metaphysical). But the way that Ferrante offers such a scathing critique of the hypocrisy of male midlife crises is so compelling here. This is particularly so because in the pages that follow, Olga follows her husband with “a million recriminations” in her mind. The actual objection she raises, though, is about how she provided him time; she created time. While the argument has been trod before, Ferrante does so in a particularly compelling way. She narrates, “I wanted to cry: don’t touch anything; they are things you worked on while I was there, I was taking care of you, I was doing the shopping, the cooking, it’s time that belongs to me in a way, leave everything there. But now I was frightened of the consequences of every word I had uttered, of those that I could utter, I was afraid I had disgusted him, that he would go away for good” (42). Again, there’s the tension between the righteous critique of her husband and the desperate fear of losing him for all time.

In many ways, The Days of Abandonment is a book about self-sacrifice, of losing oneself to others, and how women are especially subject to such demands. Continuing on with the discussion of time, Olga elaborates:

I had taken away my own time and added it to his to make him more powerful. I had put aside my own aspirations to go along with his. At every crisis of despair I had set aside my own crises to comfort him. I had disappeared into his minutes, into his hours, so that he could concentrate. I had taken care of the house, I had taken care of the meals, I had taken care of the children I had taken care of all the boring details of everyday life, while he stubbornly climbed the ladder up from our unprivileged beginnings. And now, now he had left me, carrying off, abruptly, all that time, all that energy, all that effort I had given him, to enjoy its fruits with someone else, a stranger who had not lifted a finger to bear him and rear him and make him become what he had become. It seemed to me an action so unjust, a behaviour so offensive that I couldn’t believe it, and sometimes I thought his mind had been obscured, he had lost the memory of us, was helpless and at risk, and it seemed to me that I loved him as I had never loved him, with anxiety rather than with passion, and I thought he had a pressing need for me. (63)

I love that passage. The personification of time—or rather its becoming material—-is particularly effective. The way Olga equates her gestures into quantifiable, measurable units, makes the impact felt that much more powerfully. The latter half of the passage provides a more refined discussion around types of love.

Olga demonstrates love in many ways to her other dependents, albeit with frustration and increasing dissociation. She hates their dog, for example: “Stupid dog, stupid dog, whom Mario had given as a puppy to Gianni and Ilaria, who had grown up in our house, had become an affectionate creature—but really he was a gift from my husband to himself” (54). She critiques Mario for his selfishness, since he “had dreamed of a dog like that since he was a child, not something wished for by Gianni and Ilaria, spoiled dog, dog that always got its way” (54). There are a number of moments where Olga abuses the dog, alternatingly being obliged to care for it.

Indeed, the dog becomes a symbol of Ogla’s obligations. Partway through the novel, Olga gets trapped in the apartment with her children and the dog, Otto. They are accidentally locked in and Olga cannot get the key to work. The obligations pile up and cause her to spiral into the self-destructiveness that she had formerly tried to portray to Mario—now, unseen by anyone else, she lives out her own prophecy. Problem after problem emerges. The dog gets sick. The son gets sick. There are ants: “they ran in a line along the base of the bookcase, they had returned to besiege the house” (126). With the ants in particular, Ferrante offers an interesting suggestion. The ants are described as “perhaps [...] the only black thread that held [the apartment] together, that kept it from disintegrating completely” (126). The notion that this flaw is precisely what grounds the apartment in reality for Olga is indeed reflective of the bigger picture: without her wards, Olga would fall apart completely. As for the ants,

without their obstinancy [...] Ilaria would now be on a splinter of floor much farther away that she seems and the room where Gianni is lying would be harder to reach than a castle whose drawbridge has been raised, and the room of pain where Otto is in agony would be a leper colony, and impenetrable, and my very emotions and thoughts and memories of the past, foreign places and the city of my birth and the table under which I listened to my mother’s stories, would be a speck of dust in the burning light of August. Leave the ants in peace. Maybe they weren’t an enemy, I had been wrong to try to exterminate them. At times the solidity of things is entrusted to irritating elements that appear to disrupt their cohesion” (126).

That final line seems to serve as a key to the text as a whole. Fissures are what reflect reality, what draw Olga back—as I mentioned, Olga gets her daughter Ilaria to stab her when she starts to lose focus while trying to tend to all of the issues she’s facing.

One of those issues is her disassociation from herself. Her loss of self manifests in various ways throughout the novel. In one gruelling encounter, she tries to give herself to her neighbour in one of the most (intentionally) awkward sexual encounters I’ve read in a novel. At first, Olga disassociates from herself using her body, but later uses her body to return to herself. All the while, she “thought of beauty as a constant effort to eliminate corporeality” (97). She describes how she “wanted him to love [her] body forgetful of what one knows of bodies. Beauty. [She] thought anxiously. Is this forgetfulness. Or maybe not” (97). She blames her mother for “the obsessive bodily attention of women” and describes a moment of connection when a young office mate of hers “farted without embarrassment and, with laughing eyes, gave [her] a half smile of complicity” (97). Again, we are psychologically contradictory. On the one hand, she wants to eliminate her corporeality. By the same token, it is her corporeality that allows her to connect with herself and others. In a pivotal moment, she describes taking off makeup and seeing herself in a triptych-style mirror. She sees “the two halves of [her] face separately, far apart, and [she] was drawn first by [her] right profile, then by the left” (123). The fragmentary nature of her reflection renders all angles of her unfamiliar to herself. She then rearranges the mirrors to see herself differently and remarks, “there is no technical means of reproduction that, up to now, has managed to surpass the mirror and the dream” (123). While using a mirror as symbolism for a fragmented identity is a little trite, Ferrante still renders the scene compelling. Two of the three reflections speak against Olga and “over those two half portions, Olga had scant control, she was not very resistant, not very persistent” (123). There is “the worse side, the better side, geometry of the hidden” (123). She continues, “If I had lived in the belief that I was the frontal Olga, others had always attributed to me the shifting, uncertain welding of the two profiles, an inclusive image that I knew nothing about” (123). She reflects on which version of herself she thought she was giving others and who others received.

I really like the way Ferrante explores the question of how we see one another. At one point, her daughter makes a statement about how Olga hits the children. Olga objects: “I didn’t hit them, I had never done it, at most I had threatened to do it” (102). She thinks, though, that “maybe for children there’s no difference between what one threatens and what one really does” (102). She continues, “the words immediately made the future real, and the wound of the punishment still burned even when I no longer remembered the fault that I would or could have committed” (102). She remembers her mother threatening to cut off her hands, “and those words were a pair of long, burnished steel scissors that came out of her mouth, jawlike blades that closed over the wrists, leaving stumps sewed up with a needle and thread from her spools” (102-103). Nonetheless, she tries to explain to her daughter that she never hit her and at most said she would slap her, but realizes “there’s no difference [...] and hearing that thought in [her] head scared [her]” (103). The difference between reality and our perception erodes and Olga “ended up in an alluvial flow that eliminated boundaries” (103). Again, the bodily is what comes to matter most: “The word ‘slap’ is not this slap” (103). Olga then slaps her daughter to prove the point. It’s chilling.

Later, when Ilaria puts on makeup, Olga is disturbed by her imitator: “What did it mean, we were identical, at that moment I needed to be identical only to myself” (121). She is nauseated by the experience and “Everything began to break down again” (121). Olga starts to wonder, “Maybe [...] Ilaria herself wasn’t Ilaria” (121). Again, Olga refers back to stories from her past—The Vomero and the poverella. She wonders if they have somehow transcended time and are actually these figures from the past, feeling, “without realizing it, I had been transformed into one of them, a figure of childish fantasies, and now Ilaria as only returning to me my true image, she had tried to resemble me by making herself up like me” (121). Olga enters the abyss. Her lapse of sense is characterized as follows:

This was the reality that I was about to discover, behind the appearance of so many years. I was already no longer I, I was someone else, as I had feared since waking up, as I had feared since who knows when. Now any resistance was useless, I was lost just as I was laboring with all my strength not to lose myself, I was no longer there, at the entrance to my house, in front of the reinforced door, coming to grips with that disobedient key. I was only pretending to be there, as in a child’s game. (121)

I’m rambling. I’m giving away the best parts and existential reflections. At the same time, I’ve withheld a number of scenes. The actual beats in the plot have been wildly underreported. One of the things I’ve hardly mentioned is the sordid affair she has with her neighbour, which leads to a number of reflections on sex and connection. She hates him, he hates her dog, she hates her dog, she needs him to help save her dog, and—when they can’t—to bury it. There’s a moment too when she thinks she sees her dog: “it seemed to me that the shade of Otto had joyously crossed the scene like a dark vein through bright, living flesh, I wasn’t frightened. The whole future—I thought—will be that way, life lives together with the damp odor of the land of the dead attention with inattention, passionate leaps of the heart along with abrupt losses of meaning. But it wouldn’t be worse than the past” (176).

Returning for a moment to the topic of sex, I’ll offer one passage that reflects the crassness that Olga reclaims it with justified feminine rage:

we consummate life and lose it because in some long-ago time someone, in the desire to unload his cock inside us, was nice, chose us among women [...] “we take for some sort of kindness addressed to us alone the banal desire for sex. We love his desire to fuck, we are so dazzled by it we think it’s the desire to fuck only us, us alone. Oh yes, he who is so special and who has recognized us as special. We give it a name, that desire of the cock, we personalize it, we call it my love. To hell with all that, that dazzlement, that unfounded titillation. Once he fucked me, now he fucks someone else, what claim do I have? Time passes, one goes, another arrives. I was about to swallow some pills, I wanted to sleep lying in the darkest depths of myself. (74).

Throughout the book, Ferrante offers perceptive insight into our internal storms. Whether it’s about the bodily or conceptions of self or time or relationships, there is a dark undercurrent that makes us question how we ought to live. The fissures seem to guide Olga’s way and when everything is going poorly she relies on the mantra “I love my husband and so all this has meaning” (88). She repeats that sentence as she falls asleep—of course, there’s some irony there which begs the question of—when she no longer loves her husband, does this journey then have no meaning?

As you can see, there is a lot to talk about for The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante. I have barely scratched the surface and worry about over-citing the book and offering very little commentary. It’s a shame I wasn’t able to make it to the book club, because I would love to have heard what others had to say about this descent—this true descent, not Mario’s superficial crisis.

Happy reading!

Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico

    Shortlisted for 2025’s International Booker Prize, Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection has rightly gotten a fair amount of attention from avid readers. Between the premise and style of the book, there is a lot to like. Perfection is about two expats living as creatives in Berlin, creating templates for websites or doing graphic design work for other creatives. Plot-wise, it’s pretty thin. We get a chapter, for instance, about what their apartment looks like. We get a chapter about their work. A chapter on what they do for fun. A chapter on their sex lives. Then, the final few chapters see their friends leaving Berlin and, feeling creeping ennui, sees them leaving Berlin for lackluster-to-dreadful experiences in Portugal and Sicily before Anna’s uncle dies and them establishing a hotel from his property.

    Character-wise, the book is a little bit thin there, too: Anna and Tom are consistently described as a unit. Perfection has two characters that never engage in dialogue and are distinguished from one another very rarely. They seem to experience the same joys, the same fears in leaving Berlin, the same sense of the present disappearing, the same hopes.

    Describing the plot as thin and the central characters as uniform, though, doesn’t really do the book justice. Perfection is conducted in such a stylistically interesting way.  The opening chapter of the book is just descriptions of photographs of an apartment at different angles. It’s a rich, imagistic tableau. The book is also divided into different verb tenses (present, imperfect, remote, future), and the style reflects the phases of AnnaTom / TomAnna’s lives. The book is replete with would bes and wills. The shifting verb tenses reflect the precarity of our lives and offer a commentary on our relationship to time in the present day.

    I suspect the prime appeal of Latronico’s novel is the commentary it offers on modern life, which cuts both ways. Tom and Anna love their remote jobs…sort of. The isolation isn’t ideal, but they are able to connect with other creatives. At the same time, they obsess over social media and post photos from wherever they are with the express purpose of making other people feel bad about not giving up steady work to travel and operate as creatives. The recurring description of their work as creating slightly-off-centered boxes parallels and critiques Tom and Anna’s frustration of everything being the same: they are creating the uniformity that bores them. But it pays the bills. The book also speaks to the collective ennui of experiences and our need for the new, different, and challenging against the more likely satisfying regularity. Tom and Anna’s sex life exemplifies that experience: they are consistently satisfied by one another, sometimes try to add something new into the routine, but ultimately are not adventurous enough to really push beyond what they know. Even when they attend sex clubs together, they do not venture out of their dyad, grateful that they do not have to take any STD tests.

    The end of the book is pretty interesting, too. In the final chapter, Tom and Anna take on managing a hotel. They host a number of clients for a weekend and then are set to restore the rooms to their previous condition. They must retain the image as presented on the website, which is a nice bookend to the first chapter. The reviewer to whom they offered a room publishes the piece with descriptions that they had agreed upon. The question is whether the effort that goes into crafting their lives is truly worth the detriment to the authenticity of their experiences. An open question.

    All things considered, Perfection doesn’t quite live up to its namesake, but the thoughtful project is uniquely memorable. It’s part novella-length character study, part commentary on the gig economy and the lives of remote workers, part existential reflection. It is / would be / will be a good book to take on.

    Happy reading!

Septology by Jon Fosse

        The books I most enjoy are often the most difficult ones for which to write reviews. This review is much-delayed because Jon Fosse’s Septology is a work of extraordinary beauty. Full stop. I’ll grant you the mercy of periods because they are infrequent (or completely absent?) from Fosse’s seven short novellas, which offer pages and pages of largely uninterrupted thought, granting reprieve only in rare instances of a paragraph or dialogue break. On the one hand, I recommend this book unequivocally as a masterpiece. On the other hand, I don’t recommend it unless you have a particular set of tastes.

If you’re a fan of Samuel Beckett’s work, you’ll find a lot to love about Jon Fosse. Septology emulates a similar rhythm to works like The Unnameable or How It Is (I can’t help but notice Fosse’s narrator Asle often repeating the phrase “that’s how it is”): there are frequent repetitions, tangential observations, and meandering passages of introspection. I think Septology has perfectly captured how we I think while capitalizing on the poetic possibilities stream of consciousness affords.

This is a novel that is both easy and impossible to summarize. In terms of actual plot, the book is pretty sparse, with only one or two “events” for every hundred pages. From what I can tell, the book takes place over a week in the lead-in to Christmas. It begins with a Norwegian painter, Asle, going on a trip to Bjørgvin to get groceries. On his way home, he thinks about checking in on his friend, also named Asle. He opts not to, but when he returns home he has a sudden feeling that he needs to go back, so he makes the drive back and finds Asle shaking on the front steps of his home in the cold—presumably DTs. He then takes Asle to the clinic and Asle is admitted to the hospital. From there, Asle goes back to retrieve his friend’s dog and is waylaid in a series of bizarre encounters similar to Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled. He meets Guro, a woman who claims to know him intimately (and intimately), suggesting they’ve slept together and he stayed at her home a number of times. He delivers his paintings to the gallery in Bjørgvin as part of an annual Christmas gallery showing. Meanwhile, his neighbour Åsleik invites him to Sister’s house for Christmas dinner (as he does every year—and every year Asle declines). Asle always allows Åsleik to select a painting to gift Sister—who he finds out is also named Guro. Asle has also painted a painting that is a brown line crossing a purple line and he decides he want to quit painting (although he ultimately paints again, creating a portrait of Sister).

The beats of the frame narrative are straightforward enough, but the novel gets complicated in its reminiscences of the past and, seemingly, of possibility. Each section of Septology seems to offer a key detail of Asle’s past, often rooted in some kind of trauma. For instance, the narrator remembers his sister’s sudden death. He talks about being a child and disobeying the rules (like going down unaccompanied to the fjords) on the same day that another boy drowns; he returns home and finds his mother so troubled, given that a boy has just died. When he disobeys the rules, he accepts a ride from a man in a van who molests him and gives him a few kroner; and it’s particularly heartbreaking when he is accused of stealing and lies and lies about where he found it. Watching his experience of guilt in lying just twists the knife of having watched him just go through a traumatic sexual assault. Another section recounts him starting a rock band, feeling like he’ll never be good enough, quitting the band, and getting into a physical fight with the singer. It recounts him getting into Art School and having his first exhibition, which is simply stunning.

Before all of this, though, about thirty pages in, Fosse’s completely engrossing prose presents a scene of such incredible, heartbreaking beauty that it will forever be etched into my soul. There’s a scene in which a young man and woman are at the park in the middle of a snowstorm and Asle stumbles upon them. He watches them as they play on the swings, make snow angels, discuss leaving, defer leaving, discuss leaving, and ultimately share an intimate experience underneath the young man’s jacket. The scene goes on for roughly twenty pages and Fosse is completely masterful in balancing a tragically beautiful tone, dancing the line of reluctance and exuberance, tenderness and danger—of loss and nostalgia. I’m not sure if it was the first time in the book, but throughout the Septology Asle often discusses a kind of invisible light radiating out of darkness, or around it like a halo. This scene imprinted on my eyelids a young woman with dark hair on a swing, an outline of light surrounding her in an otherwise dark void. I can’t put into words how perfect the moment was.

Asle returns to the scene roughly fifty pages later. The passage loses some of its effect without the blips and superfluousness of Fosse’s voice, but I’ll nonetheless present an excerpted version here to reflect its rich imagistic quality:

and they take each other’s hands and walk out of the playground and up the path to the road and I stand there and look at them and he says look, there’s a car there, in the turnoff, it wasn’t there when we walked by earlier, was it, he says and she says she can’t remember if there was a car there before or not, in any case she didn’t particularly notice a car, she says and I stop and stand stock-still for a moment because I don’t want them to notice me [...]  and then I look at the two beautiful snow angels in the playground and then I go to into the playground and stop and stand there and look at the snow angels and they’re so beautiful, so beautiful in that if I tried to paint them it would turn out to be a bad painting, compared to the sight of the snow angels, I think, because that’s how it is, that’s how it almost always is, what’s beautiful in life turns out bad in a painting because it’s like there’s too much beauty, a good picture needs something bad in it in order to shine the way it should, it needs darkness in it, but maybe, can I maybe paint a picture of two snow angels dissolving as they melt away? could I make a picture like that shine? I think and I know at the same moment, at this very instant, right now, that another picture has lodged inside me, it will be there forever, another picture has entered into me that I’ll have to try to paint away[...] I think and I see the footprints in the snow, four of them going down, right next to one another, two bigger and two smaller, and four of them going up [...] and then mine going down after the four, and my footprints look so lonely, so alone, and so uneven, so erratic, as if I wasn’t entirely steady on my feet, as if I was drunk, or staggering a little (105)

Reading it again, I retain that feeling of longing, sorrow, and beauty all commingled in the image of the snow angels and the footprints. Like for Asle, this too is a picture that will “lodge inside me.” Especially because the rest of the scene is so sparsely described, it feels as if it takes place in a black void and then these snowy moments are captured as that bit of white that seems luminescent.

There is such a beautiful attention to shading with this book, conceptually and stylistically. The interplay of dark and light makes grey, of course, and throughout the book, Asle comments with a painterly eye on the nuances of reality (reminiscent, actually of a moment in Milkman by Anna Burns). He comments on how on a house “the siding has turned totally grey and the cracks in the wood give it so many different grey colours [...] and he says that The Boathouse is grey but it’s also so many different colours of grey that don’t have names and Sister says yes and he holds her hand tight because it’s almost enough to scare you that there are so many different kinds of grey, and so many kinds of the other colours, like the ones called blue, just blue, but there must be thousands of different blue colours, thousands, at least, no there are so many that you can’t even count them, Asle thinks. […] The sky is grey and The Boathouse is grey, the stones on the roof are grey and the walls of The Boathouse are grey, but you see how they’re such different greys?” (218). There’s a kind of terror here, but also a kind of beauty. Once again: balance.

In fact, the entire book radiates with that light shining off the darkness. Asle’s paintings take the same approach. I’ll find it tremendously difficult to quote from the book succinctly, but here is a passage that encompasses the aesthetic of the light and the darkness with my own italics added for emphasis:

I think and I look at Bragi and I see life shining in his eyes and think I understand so little while it’s like these dog eyes looking at me understand everything, but they will rot too, will pass away, or else flames will consume them, once it would have been on a bonfire and now it’s in an oven, for an hour or two or however long it takes now in an oven and then the whole visible human being, the body, is gone, but the invisible human being is still there, because that is never born and so it can never die, I think, yes, the invisible eye is still there after the visible one is gone, because what’s inside the eye, inside the person, doesn’t go away, because there’s God inside the person, it’s the kingdom of God there, yes, as stands written, and yes, yes, that’s how it is, in there, there inside the person is what will pass away and become one with what is invisible in everything, and it’s like it’s tied to the visible but it isn’t the visible, yes, it’s like the invisible inside the visible, and it’s what makes the visible exist, but out of everything that exists it’s only people in whom the invisible in the visible is so closely related to what’s invisibly visible in everything else, but different from everything that exists because it belongs to everything that exists, even though it doesn’t exist itself, not in space, not in time, it is not a thing, it’s nothing, yes a nothing, I think, and only while the person is alive does it exist in space, in time, and then it leaves time, goes out of space, and then it’s united with, yes with what I call God, and that, yes invisible thing in the visible, which acts within it, which sustains it, yes, it shows itself in time and space as shining darkness, I think, and it’s that and nothing else that my pictures have always tried to show and once my eyes get used to the darkness so that I can see a little, yes, then I can see if there’s any of the shining darkness in the picture, and if there isn’t then I’ll usually always paint a thin coat of white or black, either one coat or a few thin coats of white or black, in some place or another, a glaze, they call it, and then I keep doing it, sometimes with just white, sometimes with just black, but always with a thin coat of oil paint, I keep doing it until the picture shines darkly, I paint with white or black in the darkness and then the darkness starts to shine, yes always, yes, yes, sooner or later the darkness starts to shine, I think, but now I’m so tired that I just want to go lie down (269)

The book is finely wrought, with a meticulousness whose phrases are punctuated so beautifully (though not literally), and the construction of parallels gives the book a kind of internal coherence, though it so often slips away. For instance, in the scene I referenced above where the young lovers are observed, a parallel scene emerges later on. Asle watches these young people in the park before the snowstorm gets too bad and he needs to travel home. Much later, Asle recounts his relationship with Ales, with whom he feels instantly connected (they decide before knowing each other that they are boyfriend and girlfriend, and by the end of the day they are married, in a way). He remembers being in a park and a man dressed the same as he is in the frame narrative watching over them from a van—as though Asle is both the watcher and the watched, both the dangerous man in the van and his victim.

In fact, much of the book seems to hover around this idea of what is interior and exterior. Asle talks about how he paints that which is inside him that he needs to expunge. What is inside must come out. So, when there are multiple characters with the same name, it is tempting to see these as parallel lives—other possibilities for Asle. Indeed, he is an artist who admits he had had a drinking problem, and his friend with the same name (later referred to as The Namesake), is an artist with a drinking problem who dies from it. It’s as though the line between memory and imagination ceases to be meaningful: this other Asle could have been him in other circumstances. It’s as though Asle sees exteriorized manifestations of himself all about town. For that reason, it’s a hard book to summarize because it’s never quite clear where these characters stand—Guro and Sister, for instance, look exactly the same. Guro claims to have been intimate with Asle, who does not remember her, and she looks exactly like Sister, whose name is also Guro but whom he has never met—unless he did meet her in the cafe, which he did before Guro 1’s home burnt down with her in it and which killed her.

The complications of defining the interior and the exterior of a person come up through a doubled grammatical structure that repeats throughout the text: “I think and I think.” The repetition is a bridge between two moments—the end of one thought and the start of another. But is it not also a suggestion that there are different entities thinking within the same body? The repetition seems to serve also as a distinction. I think while I think.

That motif seems to come together in passages in discussing religion. Fosse’s exploration of Catholicism is complex, asserting that God both does and does not exist. He offers some deeply philosophical-theological meditations that discuss this difference of inside-outside and the limits of the individual. For instance, one passage reads as follows, with my emphasis added once more:

I think and I think no, now I need to stop, now I’m thinking foolishly myself, thinking about other people’s folly while my own thoughts don’t make sense, they’re never clear enough, they don’t fit together, of course you don’t need to be dipped in water to be baptized, you can also be baptized in yourself, by the spirit you have inside yourself, the other person you have and are, the other person you get when you’re born as a human being. I think, and of all them, all the different people, both the ones who lived in earlier times and the ones who are still alive, are just baptized inside themselves, not with water in a church, not by a priest, they’re baptized by the other person they’ve been given and have inside them, and maybe through their connection with other people, the connection of common understanding, of shared meaning, yes, what language also has and is, I think and I think that some people are baptized, as children or as adults, yes, some are washed clean with water, with holy water, I think, and that’s all well and good in its own terms but no more than that, and every single baptism of this or that person is a baptism of everyone, that’s what I think, a baptism for all mankind, because everyone’s connected, the living and the dead, those who haven’t been born yet, and what one person does can in a way not be separated from what another person does, I think, yes, just as Christ lived, died, and was resurrected and was one with God as a human being that’s how all people are, just by virtue of being men and women in Christ, whether they want to be or not, bound to God in and through Jesus Christ, the Son of Man, whether they know it or not, whether they believe it or not, that’s how it is, it’s true either way, I think, Christianity knows a thing or two too, and sure enough I would’ve done if it hadn’t been for Ales since I didn’t even agree with the Catholic Church about child baptism, but I never regretted converting, I think, because the Catholic faith has given me a lot, and I consider myself a Christian, yes, a little like the way I consider myself a Communist or at least a Socialist, and I pray with my rosary every single day, yes, I pray several times a day and I go to mass as often as I can, for it too, yes, mass too has its truth, the way baptism has its truth, yes (22)

It essentially becomes an inconsequential question, then, which characters and are not Asle. The echoed names suggest that perhaps all characters are versions of Asle, but because we’re all connected, there’s a posthumanist core to the book that would suggest that individual identity is spurious at best.

On the further topic of religion, each section of the book ends with Asle going to sleep and reciting his nightly prayers. It serves an incantatory function that reads as hypnotic, particularly because there are sections in other languages. They have no meaning to me, but have still seem imbued with meaning. 

I’ll never be capable of explaining this book appropriately. It is more than a novel: it is a 667 page experience—for me, it felt like a spiritual one, largely due to the balance of lightness and darkness. When Asle’s neighbour sees his painting, he comments on how it looks like a St. Andrew’s Cross. Asle is irritated by Åsleik commenting on his art, which the reader experiences with such intimate closeness that it cannot help but feel completely human and real. Incidentally, it adds to a moment of tension where Asle is immensely proud of his painting and thinks it may be one of his best and Åsleik nearly claims it for himself to give as a gift to Sister. It’s something that objectively has such low stakes but has so many profound ones psychologically. When Åsleik is asking questions about his painting, Asle is irritated by his philistinism and once more comes back to the invisible light—and I can’t help but think you either feel the light or you don’t when it comes to the style of this book:

he doesn’t want to hear anything about any invisible light, that’s exactly what Åsleik would say and that’s why I don’t want to say anything to him about it, someone lives and then he dies and that’s that, no more no less, Åsleik says and he’s probably right about that too, but then again maybe it isn’t so simple, because life isn’t something you can understand, and death isn’t either, actually to put it in other words it’s like in a weird way both life and death are things you can understand but not with thoughts, this light understands it in a way, and life, and paintings, I think, get their meaning from their connection to this light, yes, when I’m painting it’s actually about an invisible light, even if no one else can see it, and they definitely can’t, or don’t, I don’t think anyone does, I think, they think it’s about something else, it’s about if a painting is good or bad, something like that, and that’s why I can’t stand thinking about the pictures I painted to make money when I was young, they were just pictures, they didn’t have any light in them, they were just pretty and that’s why they were bad, they looked so real and the sun was shining and there was light everywhere in the picture and that’s why there was none of this light, because this light is only in the shadows, maybe, I think and suddenly I hear Åsleik say that even if he’s just a fisherman he knows a thing or two about how everything goes together, everything fits into a big unbreakable whole, people catch fish, for food, and for the fish to be caught this and that has to happen and so everything goes together in a mysterious way, everything is one big whole, but you believe in God and I don’t, he says, and I say what I always say, that no one can really say anything about God and that’s why it’s meaningless to say that someone does or doesn’t believe in God, because God just is, he doesn’t exist the way Åsleik imagines, I say and I think that Åsleik and I have talked about this so many times, it’s something that’s nice to talk about again and again, and also boring to talk about again and again (80).

From this lengthy passage, I think you can probably start to see Fosse’s project in miniature. Septology as a novel, I think, is so focused on things that we “talk about again and again,” simultaneously nice and boring. It’s the kind of obsessiveness that is both comforting and arduous. This passage about the invisible light also bridges into a discussion of religion and the way that all things are ultimately connected. The difference between painting and fishing is rendered a superficial one, the difference between God existing and not is a superficial one. Essentially, all things are connected, “everything is one big whole,” so the book explores the significance of that for the erosion of interior-exterior or differentiation between identities.

To return for a moment to a connection between painting and religion, it’s worth noting that Asle thinks the invisible light in his paintings might be something like God. The spiritual work of art is addressed more explicitly later. Asle reflects on when he quit drinking and started taking snuff and he thinks about how Ales helped him quit and how Ales died and how he was so sad that he had to keep everything of hers as it was, except for her painting supplies. There’s a beautiful passage where Asle describe Ales’ paintings; she also wanted to attend Art School when she was younger and then dropped out and became very devout. She commented on how Norwegians don’t have much of a saint-based culture and she explored that by painting icon upon icon. Asle describes how when she died, there were icons everywhere, but what becomes particularly interesting is how “she’d painted over almost all of her paintings with white and some of the best paintings I ever managed to paint were on canvases where Ales had painted over her own pictures” (257). The symbolism of the moment seems to capture this idea that there’s a spiritual layer to artwork that is present even when not visible. The saints are painted over with white and then that white is painted over and that’s what allows the artwork to shine. Even when religion is erased, it persists below the surface (if there is a difference between surface and depth).

Continuing on the idea of darkness and the light that shines through it, one of the ways in which Asle tests his paintings is by looking at them in the dark. In one passage, he returns home and thinks he should close the curtains to inspect his painting. He narrates as follows:

I think that maybe I should shut the curtains, I usually do, but not it’s so dark out that I can look at the picture in the dark just fine without closing the curtains like I usually do, maybe it’s a strange habit, always wanting to look at my paintings in the dark, yes, I can even paint in the dark, because something happens to a picture in the dark, yes, the colours disappear in a way but in another way they become clearer, the shining darkness that I’m always trying to paint is visible in the darkness, yes, the darkness it is the clearer whatever invisibly shines in a picture is, and it can shine from so many kinds of colour but it’s usually from the dark colours, yes, especially from black, I think and I think that when I went to The Art School they said you should never paint with black because it’s not a colour, they said, but black, yes, how could I ever have painted my pictures without black? No, I don’t understand it, because it’s in the darkness that God lives, yes, God is darkness, and that darkness, God’s darkness, yes, that nothingness, yes, it shines, yes, it’s from God’s darkness that the light comes, the invisible light and I think and I think this is all just something I’ve thought up, yes, obviously, I think and I think that at the same time this light is like a fog, because a fog can shine too, yes, if it’s a good picture then there’s something like a shining darkness or a shining fog either in it, in the picture, or coming from the picture, yes, that’s what it’s like, I think, and without this light, yes, then it’s a bad picture, but actually there’s no light you can see, maybe, or is it that only I can see it, no one else can? Or maybe some other people can too? But most other people don’t see it, or even if they do sort of see it it’s without knowing it, yes, I’m completely sure about that, they see it but they don’t realize that it’s a shining darkness they’re seeing and they think that it’s something else, that’s how it is, and even though I don’t understand why it’s night, in the darkness, that God shows himself, yes well maybe it’s not so strange, not when you think about it, but there are people who see God better in the daylight, in flowers and trees, in clouds, in wind and rain, yes, in animals, in birds, in insects, in ants, in mice, in rats, in everything that exists, in everything that is, yes, there’s something of God in everything, that’s how they think, yes, they think God is the reason why anything exists at a all, and that’s true, yes, there are skies so beautiful that no painter can match them, and clouds, yes, in their endless movements, always the same and always different, and the sun and the moon and the stars, yes, but there are also corpses, decay, stenches, things that are withered and rotten and foul, and everything visible is just visible, whether it’s good or bad, whether it’s beautiful or ugly, but whatever is worth anything, what shines, the shining darkness, yes, is the invisible in the visible, whether it’s in the most beautiful clouds in the sky or in what dies and rots, because the invisible is present in both what dies and what doesn’t die, the invisible is present in both what rots and what doesn’t rot, yes, the world is both good and evil, beautiful and ugly, but in everything, yes, even in the worst evil, there is also the opposite, goodness, love, yes, God is invisibly present there too, because God does not exist, He is, and God is in everything that exists, not like something that exists but as something that exists, that has being, they say, I think, even if good and evil, beauty and ugliness are in conflict, the good is always there and the evil is just trying to be there, sort of, I think and I can’t think clearly and I understand so little and these thoughts don’t go (266-267)

I apologize for the lengthy passages that I’ve been including in this review, but at the same time I feel it is necessary to see the circuitous routes that Fosse’s narration takes when exploring a concept. It’s hard to give these other words or paraphrase, particularly because the concept he’s addressing seems to be outside our capabilities of logical analysis. You can intuit the fog that surrounds this book (again, The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro has the same type of fog), but how is it that one can put fog into words? Well, essentially by saying a lot that is superfluous but at the same time critical. The droplet-words look the same, but taken together form an entirely different entity. The phrase about how “they see it without knowing it” seems indicative to me of being in a firmly posthumanist framework. My understanding is that within a humanist framework, we can explain connections between ideas with a kind of logic, while posthumanism notes that there is something beyond logic that cannot be articulated. There’s a kind of epistemic framework being enacted here that relies more heavily on intuition than fact-finding, and the style intimates that intuition. 

As an aside, it’s interesting that Asle’s instructors at the Art School refused to let them paint in black since it was not a colour. Asle praises the use of grey for all of its nuances and possibilities, both terrifying and inspiring. To have black seems to be an absolute in the passage above—it’s the space where nothing is, and yet everything is in it simultaneously. It’s these paradoxical observations about the world that make this book such an engaging experience. For instance, there are two different modes of existence that Asle identifies. God does not exist but exists. It appears he’s grasping for a third metaphysical space, a paradoxical one akin to, perhaps, Jean Baudrillard (if I may be so crass as to inject theory): that which is Real is not real, that which is real is not Real.

I’m often pretty dismissive of religious literature (cough William Golding’s The Spire cough), but when it is continually touched by scepticism it seems to open up engaging possibilities. Asle addresses the common meditations for religious doubt, like “if God isn’t almighty but is more likely powerless, still he’s there in everything that is and everything that happens, because that’s how it has to be if God put limits on himself by giving human beings free will, since God is love and love is inconceivable of without free will, so he can’t be all-powerful, and the same thing is true of nature, if God created the laws that nature follows then the laws are what’s in control, I think and if God hadn’t given himself limits, for whatever reason, then he wouldn’t be all-powerful either, not in any thinkable way” (545). It’s the kind of paradox that is the starting place for many atheistic arguments and Fosse’s rambling style is exactly right for depicting paradox: if this then that, but so. The idea of self-imposed limits is an interesting one and it is somewhat Dostoyevskian as Fosse continues: “I think, because that can’t be thought, but there’s one thing I’m sure of and that’s that the greater the despair and suffering is, the closer God is, I think [...] but if you get hung up on the literal meaning, to the extent you can, then the words become meaningless, and I used to do that myself, because it’s almost like the people who spoke these words when I was growing up believed it, believed in the literal meaning of what they said, in God a father who lived up in the sky somewhere, who was all-powerful and who used that power to even exterminate millions of Jews, I think, but those who think of God like that are truly sinning, misusing God’s name, or maybe they’re not, they don’t know any better, and I shouldn’t judge them, because judge not lest ye be judged, as is written, but I can’t help it, I think it’s blasphemous to think like that (545). I think that’s a really impactful spin to consider Biblical literalism to be a blasphemous way of thinking, a degradation to the metaphorical and symbolic level.

Despite his scepticism, Asle nonetheless discusses the compulsion (yes, compulsion seems the right word) towards religion, noting, “I get very still inside, and I think that everyone has a deep longing inside them, we always always long for something and we believe that what we long for is this or that, this person or that person, this thing or that thing, but actually we’re longing for God” (464). In other contexts, this would have the religious certainty that I find impossible to believably portray in an aesthetically satisfying way, but the rationale for Asle is an interesting one, suggesting that “the human being is a continuous prayer, a person is a prayer through his or her longing” (464). There’s a devotional passage which follows where he imagines or remembers Ales singing “Amazing Grace” (song is always more than itself—how does a melody mean something?) and then he looks at his inherited dog and reflects on the humanity of non-human animals: “I look at Bragi standing there and looking at me with his dog’s eyes and I think that dogs understand so much but they can’t say anything about it, or else they can say it with their dog’s eyes, and in that way they’re like good art, because art can’t say anything either, not really, it can only say something else while keeping silent about what it actually wants to say, that’s what art is like and faith and dogs’ silent understanding too, it’s like they’re all the same” (464). This interplay of silence, knowledge, speaking, and ignorance hovers about each of these moments connecting them. It’s also notably that there’s a perpetual displacement. That which matters most can never be addressed directly, but only circuitously in the way we think through issues.

The repetition of the book is once again critical. I am remembering Gertrude Stein’s comment that “A rose is a rose is a rose.” To me, the phrase has never been a straightforward tautology, but instead something that gains incremental force through repetition. The repetition is, in some sense, adding to the meaning and the real effect of repetition is never simply restating. To that end, Fosse’s narrator takes on another dimension:

“I think, because I always think the same thoughts over and over again and I paint the same picture over and over again, yes, it’s true, but at the same time every single picture is different, and then all the pictures go together in a kind of series, yes, every exhibition is its own series, and finally all the paintings I’ve ever painted go together and make up a single picture, I think, it’s like there’s a picture somewhere or other inside me that’s my innermost picture, that I try again and again to paint away, and the closer I get to that picture the better the picture I’ve painted is, but the innermost picture isn’t a picture sort of leads all the other pictures and pulls them in, kind of, I think, but maybe I’ve now painted everything I can paint from this innermost picture of mine? I think, maybe I’ve now in a way entered into this innermost picture and thereby destroyed it? I think, but this going into your innermost picture, yes, seeing it, well that’s probably the same thing as dying? I think, yes, maybe it’s the same thing as seeing God? And whoever sees God has died, as is written, I think and I look at the snow that’s covering the windshield and I see Asle standing there in the room and I see Mother standing there looking at him (366).

What I find compelling here is this notion that despite their differences, everything is the same in a certain way and that the sameness is all united by an unseen master project. In Asle’s case, he refers to the innermost picture that is the source of all art, but the question marks in this passage note his doubt—his doubt that all of these ideas are worth exploring, that all of them are relevant to the master project. Despite the tangents, there’s an internal coherence that all of these thoughts and vignettes in the book are revisions to a moment that form part of a greater whole. They are unique and completely un-unique at the same time. It’s notable that there are almost no, if any, periods in the book, but quotation marks are so frequent. It adds to that fog of uncertainty. 

That uncertainty shows up even in our private mantras. I’m confident that there are things we unequivocally believe, despite having no proof, but also that despite our wholehearted belief there is a doubt that underlies it. At one point, Asle is reflecting on lucky numbers, specifically because he’s deciding on the number of pictures he’ll show at his new exhibit and he notes: “usually I have thirteen big pictures and six small pictures, nineteen in all, I really believe in the number nine and I always want it to be in there one way or another, or else it can be a number where the digits add up to make nine, or something, I think, but the woman supposedly named Guro told me that the number that brings me luck, yes, my lucky number, is eight, or four times two, as she also said, because that was the number she got to by adding up the digits of my birthday, she said, but I’ve stuck with nine, and also three, I think, and so now I’m not sure about the number thirteen, because I think that thirteen can be both a good number and a bad number, the same with eight maybe, I think, no, anyway, eight is a good number, I think, but usually I’ve always had it be nineteen pictures, some of them small, because The Beyer Gallery isn’t that big and Beyer told me that he doesn’t want any more pictures than that so I’ve never had more than nineteen, but one time I brought nine pictures and Beyer said it wasn’t enough, or barely enough, it couldn’t be any fewer than that in the future, he said” (249). There’s a kind of duality even in that which we hold most dear—number eight could be lucky or its opposite and there’s no external measure for deciding its reality (possibly because there’s no difference between external and internal.)

Underlying much of the text is the notion of time. Perhaps that’s where all things lead back to—our greatest question. When Asle meets Ales, it is a significant moment—and given the repetitive nature of our lives, significant moments are hard to come by. Asle offers the following narration about time and significance:

Ales says, and she says that today is one of the great days, one of the days when something happens, yes, an event, because it’s so strange, day after day goes by and it’s like time is just passing, but then something happens, and when it happens the time passes slowly, and the time that passes slowly doesn’t disappear, it becomes, yes, a kind of event, so actually there are two kinds of time, the time that just passes and that really matters only so that daily life can move along its course and then the other time, the actual time, which is made up of events, and that time can last, can become lasting, Ales says and she says that that’s how her mother Judit talks about it, how she divides up time, she says, because she and her mother Judit talk about all kinds of things together, Ales says and Asle thinks that his Grandmother died yesterday, but he doesn’t want to tell Ales that, not now, he thinks and Ales says here she is babbling away and Asle says that he thinks he understand what she means and then Ales makes the sign of the cross sitting there and Asle has never seen anyone make the sign of the cross before and Ales says that now they’re boyfriend and girlfriend. (584)

In a surprisingly short passage, all things considered, we’re given a glimpse into a philosophy of time. There is chronological, standard time, and a kind of time that only happens when events happen. It’s a compelling idea to explore, especially in the context of a book that has so few actual events. Most of the book is showing us the fabric of time that simply passes and then an actual event happens and it lasts—the impact of the moments in the text are particularly powerful because so little of the book actually “matters” to time. What might be worth further exploration, though, is the idea that time slows when events happen, because experientially it feels to be the opposite. Fosse’s narrator lingers for lengthy passages on moments from the past and anecdotal observations and it’s hard to reconcile with the idea that time slows when you’re having fun—but that contradiction may well be philosophically significant.

In many ways, Asle’s quest in the book is to achieve nothingness. I think back, actually, to the days of working at McDonald’s. There was such a satisfying feeling to emptying a box of its final row of cups and then crushing down the box and I’ve often thought I want to write a poem about “life being as empty as a box.” Asle gives voice to a similar perspective:

I’ll just lie in bed in the bedroom without even turning the light on and I’ll keep it as dark as I can, and then I’ll try to get some sleep, and I’ll try not to think about anything, because I want to let everything be empty, yes, empty and silent, yes, silent, yes, silent and dark, because the only thing I long for is silence, yes, I want everything to stay perfectly silent, I want a silence to come down over me like snow and cover me, yes, I want a silence to come falling down over everything that exists, and also me, yes, over me, yes, let a silence snow down and cover me, make me invisible, make everything invisible, make everything go away, I think and all these thoughts will go away, all the pictures I have, all the pictures gathered up in my memory tormenting me will go away and I will be empty, just empty, I will become a silent nothing, a silent darkness, and maybe what I’m thinking about now is God’s peace, or maybe it isn’t? Maybe it has nothing to do with what people call God? I think, if it’s even possible to talk about God, if that even means anything, because isn’t God just something that is, not something you can say anything about? (500).

There’s a kind of beauty and tragedy in this passage. Of course, there’s the despairing reading of wanting to not deal with anything that constitutes life any more and just drift away. It’s an uneasy kind of peace to be empty. The snow motif resonates especially because of the earlier scene of the couple in the park, which was laced with such bittersweet tension. Here, too, snow is an uneasy kind of peace—certainly, the torment of memory is covered up, but it seems to imply that all existence stops. Life requires tension to continue.

Of course, Fosse doesn’t let things be that easy, because even the idea of nothingness is a positive entity—nothingness exists in a way often not considered. He writes that “even after all of creation is gone there will be nothing there, nothingness, that’s how it is with everything that is, with each individual person, after the individual, the person is gone from creation they will be in God’s eternity, as nothing, there is God’s shining darkness, in his nothingness, because everything comes from nothing and to nothing it will return, it comes from God, who is therefore so close, so close, since he is inside every single person,  yes, he is the foundation, the abyss, yes, the innermost picture in everyone, like a full void, like a shining darkness, I think, and this was why everything came into existence, so that God could exist” (547). The way that Fosse describes nothingness is that it has effects. The darkness, the nothingness, the void, are all extant in particular ways, possibly in the highest imaginable ways. The passage continues with a meditation on God and suggests that “whether they realize it or not [...] many of the people who don’t believe in God are people who really do, while the ones who are doing all kinds of things to show that they believe in God actually believe in something other than God [...] because they believe in good works, in repentance and fasting, in sacraments, in the liturgy, in this or that conduct bringing them closer to God” (547). You can start to see why God is “nothing” here—it’s a belief in an entity that is not its displacements. It is not good works, it is not repentance—it is a belief for nothing. Again, it returns to the idea of an erosion of the difference between inside and outside: “most of those who are inside are outside, and most of who are outside are inside” (547) and the following grammatical construction pairs two opposites as being proximate: “closer to eternity and nothingness” (547). The two are the same.

I found Septology to be thoroughly engaging for exploring these paradoxes both in a philosophical register and a deeply personal one, full of moments of heart and beauty and sorrow and tragedy. To quote Fosse one more time, I think my review of the book could be reflected here: “I think and I think and think and there’s probably nothing especially smart about what I’m thinking” (547). Fosse’s passage takes on an elegiac quality from there, noting, “I think and everything exists at some point and stops existing at some point, not just me, because obviously both my paintings and myself will cease to be, how ridiculous is it to think that anything in creation won’t disappear and turn into nothing, even the most beautiful painting, the most worthwhile painting in the world will be gone someday, the same way whoever painted it will be long gone,and the greatest poem will disappear, because everything disappears, and eventually there’ll be nothing left” (547). The rest is silence, as it were.

And while I know all of this may be true—that great art will also fade and that eventually nobody will be left to appreciate it, I have to say that Septology does feel timeless. It feels like a masterwork that will linger in my imagination, and hopefully the collective one, for years to come. And if eventually there is nothing left of it, at least we’re provided with the assurance that even when there is nothing, nothing is still something.

Happy reading; sad reading. It’s the complete experience. What a masterpiece.