I is Another by Jon Fosse

...I go into the main room and over there on the easel I see the bad painting with the two lines that cross in the middle, no, I can't look at it, I can't even take the picture down from the easel and put it in the pile with the other paintings I'm not totally done with yet, that I'm not totally satisfied with, I just can't, I think and I look at the easel and I think that when I look at the easel now, isn't it like, the thought comes into my head, like God is looking out at me from the easel? I think, and now I just have to not go crazy, I think, because it's like God is looking at me from every single thing, I think and look around and it's like God is in everything around me, I think, and like he's looking at me from every single thing, I think and I think isn't the round table clearly saying with its silence that God is nearby? and the two chairs? and the one Ales always sat in, especially clearly, God is so clearly looking at me from that chair, I think, and I think that it's when I'm most alone, in my darkness, my loneliness, because it really is lonely, to tell the truth, and when I'm quiet as I can be, that God is closest, in his distance...

The second part of Jon Fosse's Septology picks up where the first has left off: the narrator, Asle, has dropped his friend, also named Asle, off at a hospital in Bjorgvin where his addictions are close to claiming his life. He has gone home with the other Asle's dog, to confront there the loneliness of the Christmas season without his wife Ales, who has died, and his friend Asleik, who is demanding one of Asle's best paintings this year as a gift for his sister. The stark, wintery landscape of Norway's fjords is full of memory for the narrator Asle, about Ales and about his childhood, his experience getting into Norwegian art school and leaving his family. We finally see the moment where the two Asles meet, introduced by a mutual friend, both as prospective art students. The other Asle is called here "The Namesake."

Is it sloppy reading on my part, or an essential trick on Fosse's part, that the Asle I thought he was talking about for 200 pages was the Asle in the hospital, and not himself? I think the latter, though perhaps an eagle-eyed reader might have figured it out all before. The narrator's memories come sudden and swift, introduced with a simple transition like "I see Asle..." I see Asle with his sister, who died young; I see Asle, having a panic attack over the thought of reading in class; I see Asle, moving away from his parents for the first time to pursue his dreams of art school; I see Asle, giving up on the kind of realistic paintings of Norwegian domestic landscapes that made him popular, etc., etc. And all the time I was trying to find an answer to that essential question--if these Asles are the same, even perhaps to the point of being the same person, or avatars of one another, where do they diverge? Why is one Asle a success and the other a failure? I thought I was finding it, perhaps, in the death of his sister. But with one quick movement, Fosse reminds us that this is the narrator Asle remembering his own life.

Ultimately, I don't think Septology has an idea of why people end up the way they do. On the question of nature vs. nurture, it's agnostic to the point of disinterest. It sets up for the reader a kind of fool's game, forces you to search for the differences and divergences, when really the thrust seems to be that human personality remains a kind of inexplicable mystery. The elision between the two Asles is maybe the most bravura thing about Septology, a project of great skill and subtlety that justifies and illuminates the pale featurelessness of the story and the prose.

And reading this time, I was struck by the novel's interest in grief and the possibility of the divine: the narrator Asle has painted this painting of two lines crossing, one purple, one brown, that he alternately considers the worst painting he's ever done and the best. But the painting is where God enters the scene, and in studying it--pointedly, a cross--Asle begins to see the presence of God everywhere. Perhaps, I began to think while reading I is Another, God is another name for that power of chance or providence that turns a life in one direction and another in another, just as God is the name for what takes away one's wife before her time.