Jon Fosse's The Other Name

Read his poems/stories, mostly centered on childhood. No reading the first installment of his "magnum opus": Septology. Dense, slow, back and forth, over and over. Different. You'll hardly ever come to a full stop. Thus far I'd say I prefer his countryman, Dag Solstad. Still, I'm reading with interest. Better viewed as a long poem. A good repository for his opining on Christianity and everything else.

Sample:

But it doesn’t really make sense, he says and I say no it doesn’t, that’s for sure, it’s a paradox, as they call it, but then again aren’t both he and I paradoxes too just standing here, because how do the soul and the body go together, I say, and Åsleik says yes who can say and then we stand there and neither of us says anything and then I say that the cross is already a paradox, with those two lines that cross, the vertical and the horizontal, as they say, and that Christ, yes, God himself, died and then rose again to conquer death, he who came down to earth when people were separate from God because of what they call original sin, when evil, yes, devils took control of this world, as it says in the Bible, yes, it’s impossible to understand that, I say, and I say that evil, sin, death, all of it came into the world, yes, into the universe, it all exists because God said yes but there was also someone who said no, if you can put it that way, I say, because otherwise there would be neither time nor space, yes, everything that exists in time and space has its opposite, like good and evil, I say, and everything that’s in time and space will someday pass away, in fact most things, almost everything that there’s ever been in time and space is already gone, almost every last thing is outside of time and space, it isn’t anywhere, it just is, the way God isn’t anywhere but just is, so it’s not at all strange that someone can want to leave this earth, get away from what can be found and rest in what just is, in God, as Paul said, yes, something like that, I say and Åsleik says that we’ve talked about this a lot before and we’ll probably talk about it a lot more and I say you’re right and I see Åsleik go over to the picture I have standing on the easel, which is set up in the middle of the room, and unusually for me it’s a rather big canvas and rectangular, and first I painted one line diagonally across almost the whole surface of the picture, a brown line, in very thick drippy oil paint, and then I painted a matching line in purple from the other corner and it crossed the first line in the middle, forming a kind of cross, a St. Andrew’s Cross, I think they call it, and I see Åsleik stand there and look at the picture and I go over to it too and look at it and I see Asle sitting there on his sofa, and he’s shaking and shaking, he’s thinking he can’t even lift his hands, he feels too heavy even to say a word, Asle thinks, and he thinks that the only thought he can think is that he should disappear, go away, he’ll leave and go out and then go out to sea ...