A New Name by Jon Fosse

And I see myself standing there looking at the two lines that cross in the middle, one brown and one purple, and I see that I've painted the lines slowly, with a lot of thick oil paint, and the paint has run, and where the brown and purple lines cross the colours have blended beautifully and I think that I can't look at this picture anymore, it's been sitting on the easel for a long time now, a couple of weeks maybe, so now I have to either paint over it in white or else put it up in the attic, in the crates where I keep the pictures I don't want to sell, but I've already thought that thought day after day, I think and then I take hold of the stretcher and let go of it again and I realize that I, who have spent my whole life painting, oil paint on canvas, yes, ever since I was a boy, I don't want to paint anymore, ever, all the pleasure I used to take in painting is gone...

A New Name closes out Jon Fosse's Septology, a work that is either one book or seven or, in this case, and probably the least reasonably, three. It continues the present story, in which the painter Asle prepares to visit his friend's sister for Christmas day and struggles with a numinous painting, and the story of the past, which comes in memories that overwhelm Asle: meeting his wife Ales, who later died young, becoming a painter, as well as memories that recount the life of his friend and namesake, another painter named Asle, who is currently languishing in a hospital to which our Asle has ferried him. How does Asle know all this stuff about the other Asle? He might be thinking through what he's been told, of course, but there's a strong suggestion, too, that the men have somehow overlapping identities, and that our Asle draws from a store of memory that belongs to him as well.

Many of the memories in A New Name are lovely, happy memories. We hear how Asle met Ales one day by pure chance, and how they became almost immediately joined at the hip. The same day that Asle meets Ales, he goes to rent a room in Bjorgving where he'll be attending art school. The landlady, an aged beauty named Herdis, is suspicious of Ales, and refuses to let her in the house. Later on, Asle paints the stern landlady's portrait in exchange for free rent he will end up not needing, as he moves in with Ales almost immediately. This old lady is, I thought, one of the novel's best characters: an image of the way that people seem to shrink into themselves, their homes, with age, and I enjoyed her mix of affection of possessiveness.

But A New Name ends up being quite a sad ending, I thought. Spoiler alert--the namesake Asle dies, and we find out bloodlessly, through a nurse at the hospital. Fosse piles it on, too, with the unexpected death of Guro, a woman who had been flirting with Asle in the previous novels (and who, as one of the novel's many doubles, resembles the sister whose house Asle is meant to head to for Christmas day), in a terrible fire, no less. The book ends with Asle rebuffing the advances of said sister and then, perhaps dying himself as a "ball of blue light" shoots into his forehead. The Lord's prayers, then, that end each of the novel's seven sections, and which underpin its thematic interest in the presence of God and the possibility of knowing God, take on the sense of prayers for the dead, in which the protagonist finally includes himself.

Olav Audunsson: Crossroads by Sigrid Undset

Now, in a state of calm reflection, Olav listened to the only voice that spoke to him in a language he understood. Here, in this foreign land, all other voices shouted at him as if there were a wall between them and him. Yet the voice of the church was the same one he had listened to as a child and a youth and a grown man. He himself had changed in terms of goals and thought and speech as he moved through the stages of life, but the church had changed neither voice nor meaning. It spoke to him in the holy mass just as it had spoken to him as a little boy, when he understood very few of the words yet still understood much by observing--the way a child understands his mother by watching her expressions and gestures before he understands the spoken words. And Olav knew that if he traveled to the farthermost regions where Christian men lived, their language and customs and appearance might seem strange and incomprehensible to him. But wherever he happened upon a church and went inside, he would be embraced by the same voice that had spoken to him when he was a child.

When we last left Olav Audunsson, his wife Ingunn had just died after a long illness. Ingunn's death resolves what might have seemed like the central tension of Undset's tetralogy, the love between the man and woman that thrived in spite of all the machinations of their families to drive them apart. I admit I was surprised, but I had to remind myself that, as one learns in Kristin Lavransdatter, Undset is no believer in the primacy of romantic love when there is a higher love, and a higher law. But Ingunn's death leaves Olav in a strange place, having taken in Ingunn's love-child Eirik and raised him as his own, while his own bastard, a son named Bjorn with a woman named Torhild, is at a neighboring estate. It's Eirik that will inherit the manor Hestviken, despite Olav's dislike of him (and he is quite annoying, apart from being the son of another man), while Bjorn exists for Olav only as a reminder of lost possibilities.

The first part of Crossroads is taken up by a trip to London, where Olav does some merchant business. Olav, lonely and adrift, nearly enters into an adulterous relationship with the wife of a blind man, but runs away at the last minute, repelled by her strangeness and foreignness. The blind man's wife speaks in a language Olav can't understand, but during his trip he rekindles his love for the church, which, as described in the passage above, speaks in a universal language that can be understood no matter where Olav is. Olav decides, with only some misgivings, that he will never remarry, and devote the remainder of his life to the memory of Ingunn and to the church.

The novel's subtitle suggests that it captures Olav at a "crossroads," and the novel feels like a crossroads, too, a necessary transition between points of stronger dramatic tension. The conflict that's established between Olav and Eirik only festers. Though the two find a way to become somewhat closer, Eirik's anxiety that somehow his inheritance will be stolen from him--deep down, perhaps, he understands something that he cannot articulate about why his father is so alienated from him--make him especially anxious and unreliable. Ultimately, Eirik flees from the conflict, entering into a knight's service, and the last time we see him, he has grown at last into a man. Olav is left with his manor and his daughters, but more or less alone.

The novel ends with something I'd never seen from Undset before: an honest-to-god battle. When Olav hears that Norway has been invaded by a Swedish duke, he and his fellow knights are called into battle to repel the party of the invaders. In the melee, Olav is badly wounded and left facially disfigured. (Perhaps sealing the deal on that promise to never remarry.) This, it felt to me, was the point to which Crossroads has been leading our hero: ravaged, abandoned, and yet with a renewed sense of his own obligations to God and country, which perhaps will steel him in whatever crisis of inheritance and fatherhood is coming in the series' final installment--coming, for this reader, next December.