The Other Name by Jon Fosse

...it's true probably the only thing I could have ended up doing was painting pictures, and if I wanted to make a living I need to paint, and that's both good and also wrong, but that's what I did and kept doing, I painted picture after picture, I did that at least, and when I wasn't painting I often spent hour after hour just sitting and staring into space, yes, I can sit for a long time and just stare into empty space, at nothing, and it's sort of like something can come form the empty nothingness, like something real can come out of the nothingness, something that says a lot, and what it says can turn into a picture, either that or I can stay sitting there staring into empty space and become completely empty myself, completely still, and it's in that empty stillness that I like to say my deepest truest prayers, yes, that's when God is closest, because it's in the silence that God can be heard, and it's in the invisible that He can be seen, of course I know my Pater Noster and I pray with it every day...

Jon Fosse's Septology is three books, divided further into seven volumes. It's hard to say whether it's one thing or three things or seven things, and each volume itself is one run-on sentence without periods, slipping from one day in the life of the painter Asle into the next, bleeding across volumes. Since the first two of the seven were published as a single volume--and since I'm trying to surpass my book total for last year--we're going to go ahead and call this volume a book, though certainly others will say the Septology's propulsive, fluid, and unceasing nature demands that one read until the end.

Asle, the narrator, is a painter living on the coast of Norway. He's a widower, with few friends, except for his neighbor Asleik and the owner of the gallery where he sells his paintings. And, of course, the other Asle, who lives in town and who--we quickly pick up--is a kind of doppelganger of the narrator, if not something even more intimate and overlapping than that. Another version of himself, perhaps, branching off at some undefined point. Whereas our Asle is a teetotaler, having been convinced to stop drinking by his late wife Ales, the other Asle is a hopeless and miserable drunk. Much of The Other Name is devoted to the narrator Asle's attempts to get the other Asle, whom he's found cataleptic in the snow, into a clinic where he can be treated for his severe addiction. This becomes a kind of shaggy dog story, literally: the narrator Asle realizes too late that he must find and take care of drunk Asle's dog Bragi, and this is made all the more difficult by a snow storm that keeps him from driving back to the coast.

How did Asle become Asle and Asle become Asle? Can it really be as simple as the suggestion, toward the volume's end, that the drunk Asle was set off on his path by the trauma of being molested as a child? Such an answer would be easy, too easy--perhaps it was the mollifying influence of Asle's wife Ales, now gone. Or perhaps there is no accounting for why our lives take the paths they do. This is complicated by a sneaking suspicion that there is something in the names of the other characters--Asle, Asleik--that suggests that there are more than just these two doppelgangers, and that we are meant to see them as many variations on the same Asle. The slippage becomes comical when narrator Asle keeps running into a woman, Silje, who insists they've met before, even slept together. What's obvious to us--she knows the drunk Asle, ensconced now in the clinic--is totally lost on our aloof narrator.

The ceaseless sentence of each volume lulls you, like a drug or a dream; it's easy to feel, carried on the endless flow of it, that you have been severed from realism, if not from reality. The style is a variation on stream-of-consciousness, and not, I would say, especially innovative, but it works really well here because it works to justify the novel's slight otherworldliness, its other strange slippages, like that between Asle and Asle. We don't question the vision of two lovers playing in a sandbox, which may be a memory of Asle about himself and Ales, or which may be two real people. We don't question the way the narrative perspective breaks as the narrator's consciousness enters into the consciousness of the other Asle. Is "our" Asle simply remembering the story that the other Asle told of his formative encounter with the predatory "Bald Man," or imagining it? Or has the narrative somehow slipped away from him, and really entered into the other man? Of course, it's both somehow, and the narrative's current, which refuses to recognize the epistemological barrier of the sentence, reflects it.

One thing I enjoyed a lot about The Other Name is the way it imagines narrator Asle's art. In the two days that make up the two chapters, he has recently begun--and perhaps--finished a painting made up of only two lines crossing, a brown and a purple one. His neighbor Asleik jokes that the painting should be called "St. Andrew's Cross," and there is something religious about the experience of painting for our Asle, a way of accessing the quiet and empty place where God lives, and where creation is possible. (Among other things, our Asle is a recent convert to Catholicism, and can be seen praying his Pater Nosters with the dedication of a convert.) My favorite bits might be when our Asle describes the glow he searches for in his paintings, a glow that comes out of sheer darkness, made layer by layer on the canvas; he tells us that he only knows when a work is finished if, when he turns the light out, the glow remains. A Glow in the Darkness might be another, more florid name for the first volume of the Septology.

I'm still searching, I think, for what people love about these novels, and what the Nobel committee saw in them (and Fosse's work more generally) when they awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature earlier this year. I will say that it took a little bit of self-sacrifice to stop with the first volume, when the narrative works so hard to carry you, like the tidal fjord, into the next one. But it took a little bit of self-interestedness, too.