Septology
An aging painter named Asle drives the Norwegian coast in winter, praying, remembering, and watching his doppelgänger, a second Asle, drink himself to death in Bjørgvin. Seven parts, seven days, and not one full stop: the whole novel is a single slow sentence that opens each part with the same picture and closes it with the same Latin prayer. Fosse wrote it in Nynorsk after converting to Catholicism and quitting drinking, and two years after the final volume he won the Nobel Prize.
Even the Wall Street Journal's admiring review concedes the effect “can be both mesmerizing and dulling,” and one art critic who read all seven parts decided “individual passages are compelling, but I don't trust the whole.” Readers who bounce off it say the missing full stops are “a bit of a gimmick” that “just creates this repetitive ramble,” and one did the arithmetic: “Without silly repetitions, the book would have been 250 pages max.” Abandonments cluster early, with a reader quitting at page 80 calling it “too self-indulgent, almost, in a weird way, preachy.” The most concise verdict on record runs six words: “Norwegian rain man rants for 700 pages.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
