This past fall, Jon Fosse won the Nobel Prize in Literature. In December, I attended a traditional Norwegian brunch and live stream of Fosse’s Nobel lecture at the Norwegian consul general’s residence in New York City.
At the time, I’d only read Melancholy, Fosse’s 1995 novel about a grandiose and possibly ephebophilic painter who ends up in the asylum. I had no idea, at the time, how intensely Septology, his recent seven-volume epic, set over the seven days leading up to Christmas—the same seven days, in the liturgical calendar, as it so happened, that I’d end up reading it—would hit me. That it would serve as a guidebook, a religious text, a light over the darkest week of the year.
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