A Full Stop Short of Eternity: The Color of Absence in Jon Fosse’s Septology

For out of black minutes of madness ever more radiant,The patient one wakes on the petrified threshold,And is ardently clasped by cool blue and the gleaming decline ofthe autumn,The silent house and the legends of the forest,Measure and law and the moonlit paths of the departed.–Georg Trakl A blank canvas seems to contain every possible image until the first stroke starts taking them away, so begins our story with a picture that cannot quite be settled, two painted lines, one brown and one purple, crossing upon a canvas, making a modest, wounded geometry whose light appears to originate somewhere beyond the pigment, while outside, on the western coast of Norway, the daylight contracts toward Christmas, and an aging painter named Asle stands looking at what he has made, though the more he looks the less securely the picture belongs to him, and this is the threshold of Jon Fosse’s Septology, a seven-part novel published in three volumes, The Other Name, I Is Another, and A New Name,…