out onto the landing. I pull the boat in and then carefully put the pitchfork in the front of the boat. Fosse brings the same passion and the same commitment to his characters into the first two volumes of The Other Name. There is virtually no plot. Style is more important than story. As the title suggests, there appear to be characters who share a name. The novels drown in doppelgängers. The primary one is Asle, a widower (his wife’s name was Asles—this is not the last time that names look alike) and painter living alone in the village of Dylgja. He has infrequent contact with a nearby neighbor, Asleik, from whom he gets lutefisk and lamb ribs. Asle gives Asleik paintings to gift to his sister, Guro, perhaps as penance for what might have been a presumed affair. Another Asle (call him Asle 2), also a painter, lives thirty miles south of Dylgja, in the city of Bjorgvin. Over the two days of the two-part volume, Asle 1 travels back and forth between both sites in order to deliver some of his paintings to the Beyer Gallery. During his trips, he reflects on past events, some of which may be real memories and some of which may be imagined. Three provocative sequences include seductive images on a swing, a seesaw, and in a sandpit. There is a lyricism to the prose at the same time that it has a sexual connotation. One “grown-up child” pushes another higher and higher until she/Asles is “soaring and moving, hanging in the air,” then he/Asle 1 pummels her into the ground until their heartbeats can’t be separated from their breathing, then they lie in “bra and purple skirt” under his “long black coat,” which he/Asle 1 always wears. It is sometimes difficult, sometimes confusing to sort out truth from fiction. Neither the narrator nor the reader is certain whether these events happened “sometime in the past” or are “just something [he’s] dreaming.” Or, in fact, is it “happening now in reality” to a couple Asle 1 is watching at a roadside viewing spot? What is clear is that the Asle from Dylgja is a painter who prays. The same description of painting opens both parts of The Other Name. It is “two lines that cross in the middle, one purple line, one brown line.” It comes to be seen as St. Andrew’s Cross with sadomasochistic iconography. For Asle, it also contains a spiritualness, a “shining darkness” that he’s always trying to paint. He seeks “something of God in everything . . . the invisible in the visible.” These first two parts of the series close with the counting of the rosary, the narrator holding a “brown wooden cross” between thumb and finger, reciting a prayer, breathing in and out, asking for mercy. In that Asle knows the light in the darkness illuminates the hidden subject, the same can be said for The Other Name. Out of the darkness of the deep prose comes the saving light of the penitent. The Other Name: Septology I–II evokes the stunning autofiction of Fosse’s fellow Norwegian writers, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s (once Fosse’s creative-writing student) monumental My Struggle and Vigdis Hjorth’s controversial Will and Testament. Its striking characters and whiplash prose make for compulsive reading, engrossing from the start, unforgettable at the end. It is cerebral, challenging, and rewarding. It’s like reading an M. C. Escher print. It is a captivating meta-experience that leaves the reader Waiting for Fosse. Robert Allen Papinchak Valley Village, California bring us back repeatedly to the catalyst of the story in subtle ways. She masters both lateral and vertical m o v e m e n t within the same paragraph , especially at the ends of the chapters, by juxtaposing her lines, both grounding us in the physical images and elevating us to higher thought simultaneously. Bertino has a tendency to subvert readers ’ expectations at every turn. She breaks convention by including one chapter from Simone’s point of view, when the rest of the novel is written from the bride’s. Here, Simone has a...