Septology

I'll be honest – I took 4 entire months to get through this. Not because it was hard to read, but because it was the first book I've read in a long, long time and I just wasn't good at focusing. This book was so good that it made me pick up reading again after a decade. I stumbled upon it on a summer vacation, at a bookstore in Copenhagen, under the "Scandinavian Literature" section. It was probably the best thing that happened to me on that trip. I bought I-II first because I didn't want to commit to buying all 3 compilations at one go. I immediately got hooked, then returned to the same bookstore a few days later, only to find that III-V and VI-VII were gone! I had to buy the rest from the Fitzcarraldo online store. Anyway, I read this series in sporadic bursts, then got distracted with life in between – but each time I came back to it, I'd be sucked into a magical trance. I have never read anything like this before. Yes, his sentences never end – but it doesn't confuse you or feel overbearing; it's a powerful meditation that pushes you forward gently, like a flowing river. Sometimes it turns into a vortex that pulls you in even further. Fosse's writing style brings you directly into his mind, you jump from one thought to another, a memory, the present, some intense rumination, and then snaps you back to simply being in the present again. It just so happened that I finished the last part of the book on Christmas day over the holidays, while Asle was spending Christmas Eve in the story. That really added to my overall reading experience. It felt almost like... I was meant to drag this on for 4 months... so that I could finish the book on a perfect note. Jon Fosse is now my favourite author, period. I bought his entire bibliography after finishing this, haha! I must also say that the translator Damion Searls did an amazing job, it must not have been easy to approach a work like this. That being said, I understand that his writing style is a love or hate thing – you can't possibly be neutral towards something this unconventional. I think it's genius.