Septology

4 ideas

1. The painter who finds his drunken double

   Asle, an ageing widowed painter living alone at Dylgja on Norway's west coast, drives to the town of Bjørgvin and finds another painter, also named Asle, collapsed drunk in the snow. He takes him to hospital and looks after his dog, Bragi. The double reads as the life Asle might have lived had he not stopped drinking and had he not met his late wife Ales, so the two men test whether identity comes from character or from the contingencies that happen to rescue one person and not another.

2. Painting expels images and reveals hidden light

   Asle paints the images that burn themselves into his mind so that he can get rid of them, which makes painting a discharge rather than a record. He treats a painting as good only when a light that is not in the depicted scene shines through its darkness. On this view the artist's task is to let something invisible show through the visible, not to represent what is seen.

3. One unbroken sentence makes time simultaneous

   The whole narrative is one sentence with no full stops, and past and present slide into each other without markers. Memories of youth, Ales and the double arrive in the present tense alongside what is happening now. The form suggests that a remembered life is not stored behind us but coexists with the present moment, and that consciousness has no clean breaks.

4. Prayer as repetition toward divine nothingness

   Through that repetition he reaches a stillness in which God is experienced as a nearness felt as absence, darkness or nothing. Faith here is a practice of emptying the self rather than holding beliefs about God, and the prose's own refrains enact the same repetitive rhythm.

Save and mark ideas in the app