One day in late autumn, a man goes for a drive so far into the countryside that he begins to pass no more dwellings of the living, only abandoned farmhouses and cabins. At last, he pulls into a forest and goes down a road so deeply rutted that the car finally becomes stuck. Night is falling. It has begun to snow. The man decides to leave his car and walk alone into the dark woods to try to find someone to help him.
This could be the beginning of a horror story; it is, instead, the opening of A Shining, a slim new novella by the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse, our 2023 Nobel laureate in literature, whose fiction rather astonishingly dissolves the border between the material and the spiritual worlds. Readers of English who knew Fosse before his Nobel perhaps had seen one of his plays, which are among the most performed in Europe, or read his seven-book suite of novels called Septology, a three-volume single sentence monologue that is simultaneously a radiant liturgy, a doppelganger story, an ars poetica, and a profoundly moving meditation on love and ageing and death. After I finished the last book of Septology, I walked around in a haze for a long while, simply grateful to be alive. The work is so breathtakingly strange and unclassifiable that it seemed to me as though Fosse had created a new form of fiction, something that has a deep kinship to Samuel Beckett’s work, but is infinitely more gentle and God-soaked. And though a thick, monologuing, metaphysical novel may seem daunting to a casual reader, one of Fosse’s peculiarities is how accessible his work is to nearly anyone who’ll allow themselves to simply succumb and let the gentle waves of his prose break over them.
