This third part continues to blur the marks of temporality and identity. Asle, the lonely painter whose flow of consciousness is followed, is invaded by reminiscences where past and present confuse each other, where each character is a mirror of himself or another. The memory of his deceased woman Ales and their meeting rubs shoulders with the concern for the alcoholic forfeiture of his friend Asle – the same name, same profession, intended different. Likewise, the memory of their beginnings as painters refers to the question of his desire to create, while his paintings are sold well now.
A quest for absolute
In the present time, Asle is preparing for a New Years Eve in the company of its neighboring neighbor, Asleik. As thin may seem this intrigue, the text gradually thickens by the back and forth of memory and contemplation, until this very symbolic Christmas evening.
If he does not touch the peaks of grace of the second volume, he reaches in places a swirling power which can recall Faulkner – but under Beckett’s tunes, as the style appears paradoxically very refined, a “slow prose” as Jon Fosse calls him.
The criticism of “I is another”, second volume of septology
Love and death, doubt and absolute, faith and fall. Life thus reduced to its great questions may seem far from everyday life, yet it is in the banality of Asle’s gestures, in the simplicity of its words, that its meditation is anchored.
However, the narrator is wary of language, because “These thoughts are probably only words, and words lie all the time, and I do not believe in words, never, and I do not believe either of the thoughts that I formulate in words, I think, and I think it is only in my images, when I paint well, that, yes, something can be said”.
Then clarity and darkness intertwine and form in his mind images that it is precisely for the painter to “de-pewting” on the canvas, as if to exorcise them, to find by his art an “obscure light”, obviousness in silence, the invisible in the visible.
It is in this very personal sense that converge, in the book as in the life of Jon Fosse which has converted late to Catholicism, faith and artistic creation. The strength of this Septologie lies in the scope and freedom of this quest. And in that she succeeds in making her sensitive to everyone, pious or incredulous, and to read even her prose a spiritual experience.
⇒ A new name. Sevenology Vi-VII | Novel | Jon Fosse, translated from the neo-Norwegian by Jean-Baptiste Coursaud | Bourgois, 250 pp., € 21, digital € 16
