The seven-novel sequence, just about 800 webpages, is narrated in a stream of consciousness with no sentence breaks, and the namesake-doppelgänger story line is hardly ever definitively proven as an prolonged speculative training or an astounding coincidence (or taciturn act of autofiction). Each novel begins, midthought, the identical way, with Asle reflecting on how to finish his portray of the St. Andrew cross every single one ends the similar way, mid-Latin prayer, at the very least right up until one thing else comes about in the remaining guide. Nonetheless, Asle is a recognizable variety, recalling the primary figures of Marilynne Robinson’s “Gilead” and Paul Harding’s “Tinkers,” T. S. Eliot’s “Gerontion”…