The seven-novel sequence, almost 800 pages, is narrated in a stream of consciousness with no sentence breaks, and the namesake-doppelgänger story line isn’t definitively established as an prolonged speculative train or an astounding coincidence (or taciturn act of autofiction). Every novel begins, midthought, the identical means, with Asle reflecting on the right way to end his portray of the St. Andrew cross; each ends the identical means, mid-Latin prayer, no less than till one thing else occurs within the remaining e-book. Nonetheless, Asle is a recognizable sort, recalling the primary figures of Marilynne Robinson’s “Gilead” and Paul Harding’s “Tinkers,” T. S. Eliot’s “Gerontion” and Samuel Beckett’s “Krapp’s Final Tape”: previous males surveying their lives, balancing immediate-feeling questions on mortality with intense, incomplete and ambivalent recollections of previous occasions and other people, and likewise the heightened calls for of on a regular basis life close to its finish. That is Asle when he’s remembering childhood experiences like mendacity to his mom about the place he received a handful of krone cash; enjoying on a rocky seashore along with his sister; seeing his grandfather’s boots shining within the rain; going to artwork faculty in opposition to his skeptical mother and father’ needs; assembly his future spouse, Ales; leaving the Church of Norway; turning into a Catholic; and likewise when he’s worrying, as an aged particular person, about whether or not to drive in dangerous climate; whether or not he is aware of somebody’s identify in a pub; whether or not to stroll the canine in a snowstorm; whether or not to promote or retailer a portray; whether or not to simply accept an invite to Christmas dinner.
No matter Asle’s minor encounters and fragmented recollections imply on their very own, these are in the end secondary to his detailing an intense, unbroken feeling of connectedness to God. On this means, Asle will not be like Gerontion and the remaining: He desires “to grasp the incomprehensible” about his life, about life itself and about God. Furthermore, in contrast to, say, the equal want and quest in Dante’s “Paradiso,” there’s no epic otherworldly journey main as much as a symphony of magisterial-metaphysical ecstasy. In truth, there’s actually not a lot motion, outwardly or inwardly, in any respect. Asle is, roughly, already there — understanding and feeling recognized by God. This sense, in flip, irradiates his ideas and emotions concerning the vocation and work of an artist, and likewise about what it means for a believer to reply to the felt presence of God in his life — even with a brashly uncultured, nonbelieving fisherman coming by to needle him for portray a bizarre image time and again and going to church an excessive amount of.
The repetitiveness of the novel’s opening and shutting conceits, the paucity of typical occasions and the stream-of-consciousness narrating for a whole lot of sentence-free pages are, collectively, lastly much less provocative than the intactness of the protagonist’s conviction, to paraphrase the opening of John’s Gospel, that the world is a darkish place, {that a} divine gentle shines via this darkness, and that the darkness doesn’t overcome it. Amid bouts of despair and doubt, Asle deeply believes this, and needs to convey it in his portray:
“It’s all the time, all the time the darkest a part of the image that shines probably the most, and I feel that that could be as a result of it’s within the hopelessness and despair, within the darkness, that God is closest to us, however the way it occurs, how the sunshine I get clearly into the image will get there, that I don’t know, and the way it involves be in any respect, that I don’t perceive, however I do suppose that it’s good to suppose that perhaps it took place like this, that it got here to be when an illegitimate youngster, as they put it, was born in a barn on a winter’s day, on Christmas the truth is, and a star up above despatched its robust clear gentle all the way down to earth, a lightweight from God, sure it’s an exquisite thought, I feel, as a result of the very phrase God says that God is actual, I feel, the mere incontrovertible fact that we have now the phrase and thought God signifies that God is actual, I feel, regardless of the fact of it’s it’s no less than a thought that it’s attainable to suppose, it’s that too, even when it’s not more than that, however it’s undoubtedly true that it’s simply when issues are darkest, blackest, that you simply see the sunshine, that’s when this gentle will be seen, when the darkness is shining, sure, and it has all the time been like that in my life no less than, when it’s darkest is when the sunshine seems, when the darkness begins to shine, and perhaps it’s the identical means within the photos I paint, anyway I hope it’s.”
In a later quantity, reflecting on the darkness of artwork and life alike, Asle observes that “an image’s not finished till there’s gentle in it.” This can be a hope that Caravaggio little question would have acknowledged, and can also be, in good, refined methods, Fosse’s preparation for the top of “Septology” itself.
It’s solely within the remaining pair of novels, now showing in English beneath the title “A New Title,” that Asle stops portray the brown line and the purple line. He accepts that these efforts, in artwork and in his relationships with others and with God, matter solely insofar as they create the area for an in-breaking of sunshine and a presence not his personal. Feeling weak and mendacity down in a stranger’s spare bed room earlier than dinner, Asle prays as he has on the finish of every previous novel. Solely this time, he’s decisively interrupted: “I breathe slowly out and in and I transfer my thumb and finger as much as the third bead and I say to myself Ave Maria Gratia plena Dominus … and I a ball of blue gentle shoots into my brow and bursts and I say reeling inside myself Ora professional nobis peccatoribus nunc et in hora.” “Septology” ends with a portrait of an individual’s life now accomplished by — due to — gentle that has entered it. In flip, Fosse leaves the ultimate earthly sentence open to who and what comes subsequent.
