A Shining
By Jon Fosse
Literary fiction
Transit Books
October 2023
A man with apparently nothing else going on gets in his car one day. With no destination in mind, he turns right, then left, then right and so on. He literally runs out of road when his car is stuck in the mud in a Norwegian forest.
So begins A Shining, a novella by the new Nobel Prize-winner Jon Fosse, which will be published by Transit Books at the end of October.
In just over 100 pages, the unnamed narrator reveals nothing about the circumstances of his life. But the reader does learn something of how his mind works. The narrator shows he was lost before he got in the car and started driving. In the woods, he can't decide what is the most prudent course of action. Then, every time after he comes to a decision and takes action, he points out the folly of what he has just done.
There is much circular reasoning in his endless interior monologue. There also is a lot of back and forth, do this or do that, which reinforces how he got himself lost in the forest. In his life, as with his car, there is no place for him to turn around.
Eventually, he abandons his car and starts walking forward, through the forest, in case he can find someone to help with his car. Night falls and it begins to snow. He finds a large stone to sit on but knows he dares not fall asleep. So he tries to retrace his steps. He realizes that his actions are the result of impulses, that this is not prudent, and he doesn't know why he does these things.
But then, something happens. From a distance, he sees a shining presence deep in the dark woods, brighter than the moon when it rises.
The narrator makes few conclusions, but some of his observations are headed that way. And that's when A Shining becomes an allegory of someone taking a step outside of his life and taking a look at what matters:
It's true that I'm deep in the dark woods but I'm not trapped. I just can't find a way out of the forest and obviously that's different from being trapped or locked in, because in that case there pretty much has to be someone who's locked you in, it can't be the person themself who locks themself in, or maybe it can be the person themself, and if it's me who locked myself in I didn't do it on purpose, I'm trapped totally against my will, in the dark woods, involuntarily self-trapped, if you can put it that way.
The narrator's monologue is translated by Damion Searls. It's a wonderful job of featuring a rhythm to the narrator's swirling ideas that portray his state of mind. Searls has written biographies, fiction, nonfiction and poetry in addition to translating.
Fosse has been publishing a range of works since the mid=1980s. His most famous work is the multi-volume Septology. Thanks to A Shining, it is a work that I am interested in savoring.