I is Another

Asle is a painter in his later years, a widower living alone on Norway's southwestern coast. His closest companions are Åsleik, the neighbour who works as both fisherman and farmer, and Beyer, a dealer who runs a gallery in town. In Bjørgvin lives a second Asle, also a painter, whose life is marked by loneliness and heavy drinking. The two men are doubles, mirror versions of one person living two different lives, and both are wrestling with questions about existence.

This is the second volume of Jon Fosse's Septology. Here the two Asles meet for the first time as young men. They resemble each other so closely that they dress alike, and both are determined to become painters. At the art school in Bjørgvin, Asle meets Ales, the woman he will fall in love with and later marry.

Fosse writes in a slow, rhythmic, trance-like prose. The novel is a metaphysical meditation on love, art, God, friendship and the passing of time.