As of this writing, I am 3/4 of the way through The Other Name: Septology I-II by Jon Fosse, translated by Damion Searls (Transit Books/Fitzcarraldo, 2020). By the time you read this, I will have finished, but from this vantage point, I’m both fascinated and puzzled by this book. It’s published in three volumes, parts III-V included in the second volume and parts VI-VII included in the third (coming out in the U.S. in February). I’m puzzled because I don’t know how the various parts fit together, why it’s a septology published in three volumes, if all the parts follow the same character, or where the story, such as it is, is going. I could look these things up, but I’m choosing not to. I generally prefer not to know what I’m getting into.
I’m also a bit puzzled about why I’m finding this book so absorbing. The first part follows one day in the life of Asle, a painter living on the coast of Norway. He talks with Asliek, his neighbor and friend. He travels twice to a near-by city, the first time to run errands and the second to check in on a friend, also named Asle. A few significant things happen in the city, but that’s it, plot-wise. Asle spends a lot of time thinking and watching what’s going on around him, but actual events are few and far between.
One of the things that is so fascinating about this book is the style: it’s written as one long run-on with no punctuation except commas and question marks. Most notably, there’s no period anywhere. The text gets broken up by dialogue now and then, but this, also, is written mostly without punctuation. The book’s first word is “and,” and from there it just keeps going:
And I see myself standing and looking at the picture with the two lines that cross in the middle, one purple line, one brown line, it’s a painting wider than it is high and I see that I’ve painted the lines slowly, the paint is thick, two long wide lines, and they’ve dripped, where the brown line and purple cross the colours blend beautifully and drip and I’m thinking this isn’t a picture but suddenly the picture is the way it’s supposed to be, it’s done, there’s nothing more to do on it, I think, it’s time to put it away…
Okay, this passage is actually exciting, with Asle’s sudden realization that he’s finished a painting — and this painting comes up again and again, so this passage is the perfect opening — but from there, we go into pages and pages of details that should be boring, but somehow aren’t.
The style reminds me of Ducks, Newburyport, even though the two books are very different in tone and subject matter. The Other Name doesn’t have “the fact that” or the lists and word play that Ducks, Newburyport has (or the sections written in straightforward prose). But they both go on and on and on, one phrase after another without any breaks, and they both repeat and circle back to the same thoughts and ideas over and over.
I found both books utterly absorbing, even though both spend a lot of time dwelling on mundane subjects and thoughts and go over those mundane subjects and thoughts again and again. Asle thinks about how he likes and doesn’t like Asliek, how he’s going to deal with the day-to-day details of his painting career, whether he made the right decision in heading home rather than visiting his friend in the city. These are small, everyday problems that are the kinds of things I spend all day thinking about as well.
There’s something calming about this repetition and the slow working through of experience. I feel I’m with the character, living life with them, experiencing what they’re experiencing, but since it’s not actually me, I don’t have to feel anxious about it. I just experience the flow of thought and wait for what happens next. The mundanity and repetition make plot events, when they do happen, that much more memorable and meaningful.
Asle also spends time thinking about larger things, and, again, all the mundanity makes these sections stand out. He mulls over the nature of his artistic talent, his isolation, the death of his wife, his decision to stop drinking, the nature of his belief in God and the difficulty he has trying to communicate what it means to him.
We end up getting a full picture of his life through the lens of one day, both the practical details and the existential dilemmas. It comes to seem as though dwelling on the practical details is a way to keep the existential dilemmas at bay, although they are never far off. The book is haunted by sadness and uncertainty.
Another puzzling aspect of the book is that it’s not entirely realistic and it’s not always clear if certain events are really happening or are in Asle’s imagination. The characters merge in eerie ways. There’s our narrator Asle, the painter who lives a couple hours outside the city, and then there’s his friend Asle, a city resident, also a painter. They are doppelgangers whose lives diverged at the point where narrator Asle quit drinking and city Asle did not. City Asle’s alcoholism is becoming a crisis and narrator Asle helps take care of him, while witnessing the path he didn’t follow.
Other strange things happen: Asle (the narrator) watches a young couple on a playground, and it seems quite possible they are actually Asle and his wife — whose name is Ales! — when they were young. There are multiple characters named Guro — or are they different characters?? And Asle, the narrator, has lengthy flashbacks into the other Asle’s life. This is possible if they are actually the same person, split into two trajectories. It’s just all very weird.
The doubling, the slipperiness of time, the lengthy flashbacks into another person’s life are all mysterious and unsettling, and, as far as I can tell, unresolved. I normally do not care for this kind of messing around with reality, but here I find it easy to accept that I do not fully know what is going on. This is a novel of consciousness, and the boundaries of that consciousness are blurry, even as the story is grounded in everyday details. It feels so real, even as I’m not entirely sure how many characters the novel actually has.
It’s a novel about the mind and also about art and meaning and spirit. The nature of Asle’s artistic talent is mysterious even to himself, but he knows he has something to say that no one else can and he knows that “something” has to do with light and darkness, hope and suffering. His paintings say something he can’t put into words. They are what he has to offer the world.
The novel is so real, and yet so heady, so boring and so thrilling all at once. How does one do that??
Recently Published
New small-press books out recently that I haven’t yet read and am adding to my TBR. All quotations below are from the publisher:
Out of the Sun: On Race and Storytelling by Esi Edugyan (House of Anansi Press): “Through the lens of visual art, literature, film, and the author's lived experience, Out of the Sun examines the depiction of Black histories in art, offering new perspectives to challenge the accepted narrative.”
When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut, translated by Adrian Nathan West (New York Review of Books): “a book about the complicated links between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction.”
Oldladyvoice by Elisa Victoria, translated by Charlotte Whittle (And Other Stories): “Amid the oppressive heat, and in the aftermath of the exuberance of Seville's Expo '92, Marina spends a chaotic summer with her grandmother while her mother receives hospital treatment for a grave but unnamed illness.”
Cuíer, edited by Sarah Coolidge, with multiple authors (Two Lines): “This far-reaching, bilingual assortment of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and photography--erotic and personal, revolutionary, hopeful, joyous, and bitter--continues the legacy of defiant queer expression in Brazil and demands its prolific, unapologetic future.”
How to Start Writing (and When to Stop): Advice for Writers by Wislawa Szymborska, translated by Clare Cavanagh (New Directions): this is a “collection of pieces culled from the advice [Szymborska] gave--anonymously--for many years in the well-known Polish journal Literary Life.”
What Storm, What Thunder by Myriam J.A. Chancy (Tin House Books): “At the end of a long, sweltering day, as markets and businesses begin to close for the evening, an earthquake of 7.0 magnitude shakes the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince … Chancy masterfully charts the inner lives of the characters affected by the disaster.”
Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing Up with the AIDS Crisis, edited by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (Arsenal Pulp Press): “This wide-ranging collection includes 36 personal essays on the ongoing and persistent impact of the HIV/AIDS crisis in queer lives.”
Search History by Eugene Lim (Coffee House Press): “Search History oscillates between a wild cyberdog chase and lunch-date monologues as Eugene Lim deconstructs grieving and storytelling with uncanny juxtapositions and subversive satire.”
New on the TBR
New books acquired:
The Rooftop by Fernanda Trías, translated by Annie McDermott (Charco Press, publishing October 12th): “Rooftop is a claustrophobic novel about freedom, and also about fear, violence, motherhood and loss.” I’m so excited about this one!
Added to my wishlist (books that have caught my eye but I don’t yet own):
The Morning Star by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated by Martin Aitken (Penguin Press, 2021): I don’t love how much attention Knausgaard gets, but I also like Knausgaard’s writing, plus Brandon Taylor raved about this book, and I have liked books he likes, so…
Harrow by Joy Williams (Knopf, 2021): I haven’t read Joy Williams and should probably read her. This book “takes us into an uncertain landscape after an environmental apocalypse, a world in which only the man-made has value, but some still wish to salvage the authentic.”
Currently Reading
Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder (Doubleday, 2021): my current audiobook. A book about motherhood. The mother protagonist is … turning into a dog?
Translation as Transhumance by Mireille Gansel, translated by Ros Schartz (Feminist Press, 2017, originally published in 2014): a memoiristic, philosophical book about language and translation.
The Cormac Report
It’s book fair time at school! These days we get a link to an online flyer with the books they’ll have available that’s nearly impossible to read. That’s fine, though, because the fun thing about it, it seems, is getting to pick out books without having parents around. Cormac sometimes worries — more than he needs to — about whether we’ll approve of his choices when we’re in a bookstore, and of course he showed us what he bought when he got home the day of the fair, but I think he enjoyed getting to shop with his class instead of with his parents.
He came home with two expensive Pokemon books, reference books I think. That’s … fine. I’ll admit, I’m tired of hearing about Pokemon, but Cormac loves it SO much. He’s working on figuring out how to categorize and sort all his cards into different binders, which seems like a good exercise, and he makes up his own Pokemon and has begun to fill notebooks up with their descriptions. Even though I don’t get and never will get what Pokemon is all about, that’s okay.
Have a good week everyone!