The past, the present, the future and an imagining of each all roll along in gentle prose that is careful to review a phrase or pattern like a kindly but forgetful elder. Fosse's "slow prose" is hypnotic and gorgeous like a scene of winter snowfall, and the structural crafting within this novel is nothing short of masterful. As much as I have enjoyed many other books this year Fosse's first entry in his Septology far surpasses them all.
The patterns Fosse develops anchor the reader and signal overarching binary themes: darkness and light, innocence and depravity, God (as knowledge, not belief) and Godlessness. What I found riveting was the experience of these patterns emerging as I read. For me, it started with the brown shoulder bag and as I began to recognize and even look forward to its mention other patterns emerged. Patterns, which form a thematic network across the entire novel.
Throughout, the protagonist, Asle, who is a painter, frequently describes how he needs to look at his paintings in the dark in order to truly see them. He examines them from all angles and only when he sees these images in the dark can he paradoxically understand the light shining within them, which is his primary subject. Just so, it is the dark edges behind the many stories told within this novel, which compel the reader. This is a novel full of threats - dark and terrible threats - but at no point does the narrative become eclipsed by the menace skirting its edges. It is, primarily, a novel about light.
There are so many details to discuss about this work. It is overwhelming but never intimidating. The novel is written with grace. It never lords its gigantic implications over the reader. Everything Fosse wants to say feels within reach. It is so generous.
"...and I think I should say that God is in the great silence, and that it's in the silence that you can hear God, but then I think that it's probably better if I don't say that, and we stand there and I think that this too, like everything else, is something I've heard Asleik say so many times before, because once he gets started he can go on and on about stuff like this, and it's probably because he spends so much time alone, I think, and I think that even if he's said it before it's in a way new every time he tells me, I think, something about it is new, something's different in how he tells it, how he looks at it, every time, I think and Asleik says that the only thing that bothers him, yes, the only thing is, no, not that he never got married, not that, a female would have been a nuisance and a burden, when you came right down to it he was a born recluse, a hermit, as they say, but, he says and then he says nothing for a long time..." - pg. 110
Silence and verbosity both internally and outwardly. I love this passage because it captures so much of the novel's style, wit, and profundity. I have read several comparisons to Beckett, but the difference between the two authors is crucial. Where Beckett dwells in the bleak, Fosse finds his way to warmth, and that is everything.
