By Bram Presser
FICTION
A Shining
Jon Fosse
Fitzcarraldo, $16.99
An unnamed man drives through a secluded Norwegian forest, making random turns until he reaches a dead end. His car becomes bogged. He thinks about the road, recalling the abandoned farmhouse and cabin he passed along the way. It begins to snow, and he tosses up between staying in the car with the heating on or getting out and searching for someone to help tow him out.
Jon Fosse’s A Shining is replete with religious symbolism.Credit: AP
Opting for the latter, he sets off on foot into the forest only to lose his way. His thoughts start to circle back on themselves; short, sharp, contradictory. He is hungry. He is cold. He is tired. And then he sees it. A shimmering humanoid shape emanating from the distance, heading towards him. It’s a surreal shift that both defies and demands interpretation, a tantalising invitation to curiosity and doubt.
However, there are no straightforward explanations to be found in A Shining, the slim new novella from recent Nobel laureate Jon Fosse. Rather, Norway’s literary polymath dares the reader to make of it what they will unaided by authorial guidance. The narrative unfurls in spitfire bursts, an expanding and contracting incantation, its sentences folding into each other, or themselves, with the awe-inspiring beauty of a murmuration.
It’s a far cry from the 750-page sentence that makes up the seven volumes of Fosse’s magnum opus, Septology. Rather, this is language at its most spare and unadorned, bare branches off which the reader must hang meaning. “Everything you experience is real, in a way,” the narrator tells us. “And you probably understand it, too, in a way. But it doesn’t matter either way.”
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Like much of Fosse’s more recent work, A Shining is replete with religious symbolism, and it is tempting to read it as a Christian death allegory informed not only by the author’s beliefs – he converted to Catholicism in 2012 – but his own experience. When Fosse was a child, he fell over on the family farm and severed an artery in his wrist. He remembers seeing a shimmering light as his parents rushed him to the hospital.
This transitional cliche does not escape the narrator of A Shining. Unable to make sense of the “stunning whiteness”, he wonders if perhaps it’s an angel of God, but soon dismisses the idea. If he’s dying, he isn’t ready to admit it. Or, like the narrator in Max Frisch’s existential classic, Man in the Holocene, is simply unaware. Here the forest becomes a liminal space, an ethereal netherworld where life and death dance to the thrum of Fosse’s swirling staccato.
Whatever comfort the narrator has found in the warmth of the glowing shape and its promise to walk alongside him is soon lost when, just as quickly as it appeared, it vanishes into the darkness. But he is not alone. Two people appear, his parents who have been looking for him. Like the glowing presence, they offer little guidance out of his predicament. They bicker. The father is mostly silent. A glimpse, perhaps, into the narrator’s fractured relationship with his family. One more figure appears from the shadows, a man dressed in a formal jacket and tie, without shoes. He might be death, or an undertaker, here to make the necessary arrangements.
By now, the narrator is confused. His matter-of-fact interrogation of his circumstances is not up to the task of making meaning. “Meanings don’t exist anymore,” he says, “because everything is without meaning”.
Fosse seems increasingly playful as the book draws to a close, taunting the reader’s need for any semblance of internal logic. The shimmering presence reappears, and I was reminded of the much-loved Simpsons episode, The Springfield Files, in which Homer happens upon a glowing figure that is later revealed to be an irradiated Mr Burns.
Could it be that our quest for explanation is beside the point, and that we are better off giving ourselves to the beauty of the moment? Was it all some cosmic joke? Whatever the answers, A Shining is luminous.
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