“Septology I-VII” by Jon Fosse (translated by Damion Searls)

This novel is a collection of three volumes, themselves broken into seven sections total, which flow back and forth chronologically. All the action takes place in the countryside of southwest Norway’s coast and its big city Bjorgvin. The narrator, Asle, is a successful painter, who has a doppelganger, also named Asle, a less successful painter. Doubles, twins, reoccurrences, repetitions, and de-ja-vu all play an essential role in the narration, which drifts between first and third person. The novel revolves around themes of art, aesthetics, religion, and duty. Asle admits, “when I paint it’s always as if I’m trying to paint away the pictures stuck inside me…. once a picture is finished the picture says whatever it can say, no more no less, the picture says in its silent way whatever can be said, and if it’s not finished yet then how it’s going to turn out and what it’s going to say isn’t something that can be said in words, I think.” A converted Catholic and long-since a widow, he muses to himself, “God isn’t anything He is separate from the world of created things, where everything has a limit, He is outside time and space, He is something we can’t think, He doesn’t exist, He’s not a thing, in other words He’s nothing, I say, and I say that no thing, no person, creates itself because it’s God who makes it possible for things to exist at all, without God there’s nothing, I say…. But no one can think their way to God, I say Because either they can feel that God is near or they can’t, I say Because God is both a very faraway absence, yes well, being itself, yes, and a very close presence, I say.” Finally, Asle pontificates more on painting, “now he’ll paint away the pictures he has in his head, but he doesn’t want to paint them exactly how he sees them in his head before his eyes, because there’s something like a sorrow, a pain, tied to every one of those pictures, he thinks, but also a kind of peace, yes, that too, yes he’ll paint away all the pictures he has collected in his head, if he can, so that only the peace stays behind.”