Recommendations
Books Like Septology
Best books to read after Septology by Jon Fosse
Septology is the masterwork of a Nobel laureate who gives voice to the unsayable — seven days in the life of an elderly Norwegian painter told in a single long sentence that circles between present and past without transition. If the novel's slow, meditative prose and its portrait of an old man's relationship with art, faith, and mortality moved you, these books share its concern with the interior life of extreme age and interiority, its interest in the experience of faith as a lived condition, and its willingness to move at the pace of consciousness rather than narrative.
- 1Buy
Morning and Evening
by Jon Fosse
The essential short introduction to Fosse's method — two chapters: a man being born and the last day of his life; for readers who want to try Fosse's prose before committing to Septology, or to understand his concerns in the most concentrated form
- 2Buy
My Struggle
by Karl Ove Knausgård
The essential Norwegian contemporary companion — Knausgård's six-volume autobiographical novel; the comparison between Fosse's slow, meditative, anonymizing style and Knausgård's torrential autobiographical directness shows the two poles of what contemporary Norwegian literary fiction is doing with the most serious questions about art and life; both are among the most ambitious literary projects in contemporary Scandinavian writing
- 3Buy
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
by Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy's novella about a dying man's confrontation with his own mortality — the essential predecessor to Septology in the tradition of the literary work about dying; where Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich confronts death in terror and gradually finds peace, Fosse's Asle faces aging and loss in a state of contemplative acceptance organized around religious faith; both are organized around the question of what a life adds up to at its end
- 4Buy
Stoner
by John Williams
Williams's novel about a Missouri professor's quiet, mostly unremarkable life — the essential American parallel to Septology in the tradition of the literary novel about an ordinary life seen from the inside; where Fosse's Asle is a religious painter whose inner life is organized around mystical experience, Williams's Stoner is a secular scholar whose inner life is organized around literature
- 5Buy
The Man Without Qualities
by Robert Musil
Musil's unfinished modernist masterpiece — the comparison in the tradition of the serious literary novel about a man who takes a year's leave from his life to find out what it means to exist; where Fosse's Asle is old and has found a way of being in the world organized around painting and faith, Musil's Ulrich is middle-aged and still searching; both are organized around consciousness as the fundamental subject of the novel
- 6Buy
The Waves
by Virginia Woolf
Woolf's most formally radical novel — six voices speaking their inner lives without social mediation; the essential parallel to Septology in the tradition of the novel that approaches consciousness itself as its primary subject; where Woolf's voices speak in lyrical monologue, Fosse's Asle thinks in a single long-circling sentence
- 7Buy
Austerlitz
by W.G. Sebald
Sebald's novel about memory and loss — the comparison in the tradition of the literary novel that uses a slow, circling prose style to excavate the relationship between personal history and present consciousness; Sebald and Fosse are the two most important European prose stylists of the generation before the current one, and both have invented prose styles that make the reader slow down and pay attention at the level of the sentence
- 8Buy
Kristin Lavransdatter
by Sigrid Undset
The Scandinavian companion organized around the relationship between faith and daily life — Kristin's life in medieval Norway lived in the full context of Catholic Christianity; where Fosse's Asle inhabits his Catholicism as a contemporary Norwegian convert, Undset's Kristin inhabits hers as a medieval Norwegian woman for whom faith is the air she breathes; both are serious literary treatments of what it means to live a life organized around religious faith
More Septology Resources
More Reading Recommendations
View all →Monthly Newsletter
Never miss a big release
Get the most anticipated upcoming books delivered to your inbox once a month — no spam, no filler.
Monthly only. Unsubscribe anytime.
Book links are Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, BookReleaseRadar earns from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you.