What is it about a book-long sentence that makes you keep reading without stopping? Before I knew it I was on page 40 of Asle’s monologue about life, revisiting the same scenes over and over again with Waiting for Godot-like dialogues. Through Asle’s eyes, we read about Christianity, alcohol, and loneliness, while he muses about his painting featuring the St. Andrews Cross that symbolizes the two intersecting lives of him and the other Asle. As long as I am reading, the narrator keeps thinking, repeatedly mentioning he’s driving north while I am getting to know him and the other Asle better.

There are no sentence breaks in The Other Name: Septology I-II, just commas, and question marks. While reading I am longing for a break and looking forward to the dialogues providing respite from the neverending sentence. I almost wrote my review like that as well, but that might have been unpleasant to read, though Jon Fosse manages to write smoothly without sentence breaks. It is easy to keep track of the narrator’s thoughts, but the moment you put the book down you feel like you have to start over. 

As you are reading someone’s fleeting thoughts, they don’t stay with you. With every page I turn, my memory refreshes itself and every time stop reading to get a drink my memory gets a hard reset. What stays with me is the thought of driving north, towards the spot where the two lines of the St Andrews Cross intersect.

The narrator’s thoughts absorbed mine, I think, because he keeps telling me “I think”. I’m longing for a break but he won’t let me go, just like you can’t easily stop thinking by wishing it. The narrator considers helping the other Asle but keeps driving north instead because he can’t stand to see him suffer. “I should’ve stopped and then taken him with me out into life, yes, so he could live a little, yes, but instead I kept driving north like I wasn’t worried about him, like I was in such a hurry to get away from him, because I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t see Asle lying there”.