Asle is a widowed and aging painter who lives alone on the edge of a fjord far from Bergen, in Norway, in a seaside swept by snow or ice that he travels by car. We find him a little before Christmas, just before the annual exhibition that a gallery owner has dedicated to him at this time of year for forty years.
He is the obsessive hero of a prodigious 1100 page ongoing trilogy entitled Septologyby the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse, 64 years old, Nobel Prize for Literature 2023. The first volume was entitled The other name. Septology I-II (Christian Bourgois, 2021, now available in paperback). The last one, which is called A new name , will be published in 2025. And here is I am anothervolumes III to V of Septology.
The whole thing is a long reflection in a single sentence which takes us into the depths of the soul of a solitary man marked by life, which makes us think of this sentence from Saint-Denys Garneau: “I am a painter who walks what he is among what there is. »
In Asle, the past and the present merge, like darkness and light. Appearing before his eyes at any moment, like the ebb and flow of the tide, his mother, his father, his deceased wife, friends who have disappeared. A way of telling a story, a way which at first glance can confuse and destabilize the reader, but which quickly ends up winning the day.
Playwright, poet, novelist, Jon Fosse, who has been translated into around fifty languages, is best known for his theatrical work. Like his hero and his double, who seeks to abandon painting, to “de-paint”, the writer for his part “decided to completely stop writing plays”, he says in his Nobel acceptance speech (And a silent language. Speech at the Swedish AcademyChristian Bourgois, 2024, 36 pages).
Long an atheist, Jon Fosse himself had what he calls “an encounter with God” and he converted to Catholicism in 2013. The mysteries of faith – without there ever being any question of nonsense –, silence, light, the issues of creation and transcendence nourish “I is another”.
“I just wanted to paint to say what could not be said otherwise, yes, to make an absent presence appear in the painting, that’s what I think, to make the black shine in the painting, or to make the luminous darkness appear in the painting , I think, and how many times have I had these thoughts, I think, because I always have the same thoughts, over and over and I always paint the same picture, over and over. »
“One thing is certain in any case,” said Jon Fosse in his Nobel acceptance speech, “I never wrote to express myself, as they say, but rather to distance myself from myself. »
A sort of metaphysical thriller with hypnotic writing – like Lobo Antunes or Saramago -, I am another is an immersive and exciting reading experience. As long as we really ask ourselves and agree to give in to it.