This is weird enough to keep reading the rest of the series for now.

I

Every observation and piece of dialogue is autistically & mechanically suffixed with "I think," or "he said." Every single one of them. And much of the dialog consists of the characters saying the same things back and forth to one another going "'yes.' I said. 'Yes.' he said." It's so jarring.

Not a lot happens in the story itself really at all. Plot is secondary to the protagonist's musing about identity and art. But the musings are not even fully internalized. The plot that does occur reflects the depth that the reader should be seeking in Asle's musing.

Asle is a painter (he thinks), and a Catholic convert (he thinks), and a sober alcoholic. He drives to Bjørgvin where he has an art show and contemplates / dream-sees his friend/doppelgänger who is also called Asle, also a painter and suicidal. He's like the alternate mirror image of who main Asle could be if he played his cards differently.

When he returns from Bjørgvin, main Asle is confronted by his neighbor Åsleik who is squatting in his house ??? because he took literally an exaggeration that main Asle exclaimed about "you can have the house if you help me move this boat." Åsleik seems rude and literal and weird. But so does everyone else. After the house dispute where main Asle seems kind of like a pushover who is just happy to have a friend like Åsleik to spend the holidays with (he always lets Åsleik choose a painting to give to his [Åsleik's] sister Guro), main Asle returns to Bjørgvin on an impulse (forgot pain or smth) and finds the doppelgänger Asle collapsed on the steps in front of his apartment in the snow Ryan Gosling bladerunner style. He's insistent that he just needs a drink to calm his nerves.

Last place either Asle belongs is a bar, but they go. Main Asle turns his back for one second to call a taxi (because the other one refuses to go to the hospital despite obviously DT'ing), and doppelgänger Asle has a lucid blackout and collapses for like the third time. Main Asle takes him to the hospital where he (doppelgänger) is convinced they’re out to sea when he blacks back in. Main Asle goes and gets doppelgänger Asle's dog from his apartment, then checks into a hotel that he's never been to. Dogs aren't allowed but the concierge makes an exception because main Asle (being confused for doppelgänger Asle) is such a good guest. Main Asle's identity begins to fully crumble in the hotel as he continues to dream-see doppelgänger Asle's life, and recollect things about the other as if they happened to him, going so far as to muse about his (main Asle's) favorite room in the hotel (that he just said he'd never stayed within).

Main Asle paints every day. His wife appears to be dead. Unknown what happened to his child, and all the time that he spends alone, produces the result that when he does talk to someone else, he speaks too much.

Further complicating the matter, the protagonist starts digressing into the focus of his prayers and how he avoids praying for himself, but will happily intercede or pray for other others. For example his friend the doppelgänger.

Part I ends with Main Asle flickering between identities, bouncing between a drunken stupor and apostasy.

II

Part II begins with him standing before the same cross that he was contemplating at the beginning of part I, before setting out in search of Guro (Åsleik's sister, who may be a bit loose and a former love interest of both Asle's) to find the dog. Throughout this sequence, he interpolates between past and present as he remembers (through dream-see'ing himself in 3rd person some more) childhood memories with his sister Alida. They get in trouble for going to the sea when they're not supposed to, and hanging around with the neighbors without telling their mother. There's a few moments of "stranger danger" which foreshadow Asle (I missed if it's past or present, almost surely past) being molested by a man who gave him a ride somewhere.

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