Screaming and weeping and wailing

I read Septology by Jon Fosse at the start of this year. I was excited to read it but I saved it as a treat for a while. I have loved the shorter works by Fosse that I have read. I find his writing so distinctive and funny and fresh and real, totally free of what my friend Nicole Flattery calls “emotional contrivances” (“I lay on the floor and I wept and I wept”, “I found out about a traumatic event and I couldn’t get over it”, “he or she was my tormentor”) or overzealous thesaurus usage or humour which signposts itself so heavily it is simply not funny.

Septology was no different. I don’t need to recommend it, he did just win the Nobel prize. But I thought I would say it is funny and fresh because work like this, which uses a different convention of syntax or grammar, tends to be described as challenging. I don’t agree, I think people adjust to the meaning of a new convention of full stops or commas or whatever after a few pages. Didn’t we all learn to read in the first place because we have the ability to do this?

It is sometimes said in reviews that Fosse is hard to quote. Septology is told in eight units that each unfold over a single sentence. But obviously when writers do this the comma naturally serves a similar function to a full stop in some or many cases. Likewise there are a lot of young writers working at the minute who don’t really use commas very much at all, and in their work full stops have a comma-like role in some or many cases. I suppose the idea, though, is that the meandering character of his prose is hard to capture over a short quote. I actually don’t agree with this. Here is one which I think works well to show the humour and freshness:

“... the woman who’d lived with a fiddler who eventually just drank all the time and she told him to leave and he did which she’s really regretted since then…”

I think that “challenging” label can put people who would enjoy certain books a great deal off reading them. There is a great scene in Septology which I read as being about this actually. A boy who has been a bad student and a delinquent talks about ...