I Is Another - Jon Fosse's second novel bookended by The Other Name and A New Name forming his Septology that's translated into fluid, clear, hypnotic English by Damion Searls.
I Is Another picks up where The Other Name leaves off. Asle wakes up the next morning and continues to contemplate the large painting he has on his easel in his studio, the canvas, where a thickly painted purple line crosses another thickly painted brown line, the two dripping lines forming a St. Andrew's Cross.
Again, we follow Asle's stream of consciousness (the entire novel is, in effect, one continuous sentence) where he does everyday things like speak with neighbor Åsleik, feed the dog he's taking care of at the moment, deal with Bayer, owner of an art gallery in Bjørgvin where he has always shown his paintings, all the while flashing back to episodes in his past along with musings on art and life.
To provide a taste of what a reader will encounter, here are several glistening excerpts from Asle's stream of artistic consciousness (over the course of three days: Septology, III-V):
Asle's Younger Years - The novel follows the thread of a disturbing scene on the last pages in The Other Name (Asle as an innocent lad is molested by The Bald Man) by delving into a number of episodes of Asle's boyhood, including his mother nagging him about things like his long hair and the time when he is introduced to smoking. “Asle realizes that he likes smoking, so he's going to be a smoker...he feels something like a nice tingling in his whole body, yes, it's like he feels calmer and somehow better, he thinks.”
Also, his fear reading aloud in high school and, before that, as a fourteen-year-old, when he quit playing the bass guitar in a rock band - “and it doesn't make sense to keep trying something you can't do, something you'll never be able to do even sort of well, it's not like with pictures, those he makes easily, like there's nothing hard about it, but as for guitar playing, well, he's just never going to able to do it.”
With each of these boyhood and teenage flashbacks, we hear echoes of Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and also Karl Ove Knausgård's My Struggle, Book 3, thus, we're given a substantially more complete and rounded picture of Asle the artist.
Divine Light – Jon Fosse relates an accident he had at age seven which propelled him into a mystical experience with the light, which, in turn, became foundational in his becoming a writer. Asle has a similar accident and experience at the age of seven - “everything is shimmering slightly, in a mysterious light that he's part of and that's much bigger than him, yes, it's everything that exists, and from this light, yes, that's like it's put together out of tiny dots of flickering yellow, yes it's like a cloud of yellow dust.”
This event has a profound effect - “Asle should never have gotten confirmed, he thinks, because it's hard to imagine anything more idiotic than all that Christian nonsense...as soon as he turns sixteen he'll officially withdraw from The National Church, he thinks, he's sure of that, because he saw it when he almost bled to death, he saw it then, yes, he saw that no National Church and no Minister knows anything about it, and The Minister just babbled on and on, Asle thinks, because reality, facts, that's something no Minister knows anything about.”
It's this light, which, at times, strikes Asle as akin to a bright flame but most frequently as a shimmering darkness that adds depth to both Asle's life and his art. And it's this dimension of Jon Fosse's novel that, for me, makes the work incredibly compelling.
Fosse's Fluid Prose - The other Asle remains in the hospital, – “I see Asle lying there in bed and there are all kinds of tubes and things attached to his body that are hanging down from a metal stand and he's lying there asleep and his body is shaking.” However, Asle is told by the receptionist Asle is too sick to receive visitors. Asle's relationship with his namesake underscores Jon Fosse's seamless shifting and sliding from actual happenings to imagination, his juxtaposing past and present.
Ales – Many are the tender moments when Asle thinks of his now dead wife, Ales - “because Ales and I lived pretty much entirely on our own, it was like we didn't need any other people besides each other, we shared our world, that was it.” And, similar to Asle, Ales had strong opinions on knowing the light, knowing God - “Ales says, because actually it's her angel and my angel that are talking to each other now, and for an angel to exist you have to believe it does, and you have to have a word for it, the word angel...and then I say that I miss her and Ales says she misses me too, but even if we aren't together visibly on earth anymore we are still invisibly together and of course I can feel that.”
With his reflections on Ales, it's clear that although Asle is an older man now living in rural isolation in Norway and having minimal contact with others, he's a man capable of great intimacy and affection, a man still feeling the pain of Ales not being there with him. Perhaps Asle entertaining the prospect of giving up his painting is a consequence of his thinking about Ales every time he thinks about painting.
Listening to the audio book of this Jon Fosse novel can be like listening to Gregorian chant. And reading the words on the page, especially when Asle thinks about the link between the light in his painting and the light of knowing God, brings to mind the words of Meister Eckhart: “The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.”
Norwegian author Jon Fosse, born 1959
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