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.
Some of this accessibility is surely due to Fosse’s translator into English, the great Damion Searls, whose intelligence, subtlety and attention to rhythm are again evident in A Shining. After the protagonist has walked for a while through the dark and snowy forest, reality begins to waver. He becomes aware of something walking toward him, human-shaped but not human, a presence “luminous in its whiteness, shining from within”. It touches him, warms him, speaks to him; he says, “I hear a voice say: I’m here, I’m here always, I’m always here – which startles me, because this time there was no doubt that I’d heard a voice and it was a thin and weak voice, and yet it’s like the voice had a kind of deep warm fullness in it, yes, it was almost, yes, as if there was something you might call love in the voice.”
After the presence leaves him, the man encounters his own parents in the woods; though he is always walking toward them, they never grow closer. When his parents leave him, he sees a man in a suit with his feet bare in the snow. The man leads him toward a great blooming of the radiant white presence he’d seen earlier. Though the novella begins in extremely short sentences and in the past tense, through the narrative it flowers into the present tense, and the end is a glory of an extremely long sentence, which gives to the prose itself a kind of gorgeous shimmer.
A Shining can be read in many ways: as a realistic monologue; as a fable; as a Christian-inflected allegory; as a nightmare painstakingly recounted the next morning, the horror of the experience still pulsing under the words, though somewhat mitigated by the small daily miracle of daylight. I think the great splendour of Fosse’s fiction is that it so deeply rejects any singular interpretation; as one reads, the story does not sound a clear singular note, but rather becomes a chord with all the many possible interpretations ringing out at once. This refusal to succumb to the solitary, the stark, the simple, the binary – to insist that complicated things like death and God retain their immense mysteries and contradictions – seems, in this increasingly partisan world of ours, a quietly powerful moral stance.
• A Shining by Jon Fosse, translated by Damion Searls, is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions (£9.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
