‘A Shining’ by Jon Fosse    (2023) – 74 pages                         Translated from the Norwegian by Damion Searls

In ‘A Shining’, we start out with this guy driving haphazardly.

“I got in this car and drove and when I got somewhere I could turn right or left I turned right, and at the next place I could turn right or left I turned left, and so on. I kept driving like that.”

Of course this aimless guy winds up getting his car stuck in the forest. He gets out of his car and while walking gets lost. In the unending forest, he first meets up with “a shimmering whiteness”, a presence. The presence says “I’m walking with you”. Later he meets his father and his mother in this dark cold forest. Is he imagining his parents?

Soon the reader realizes that we are in death allegory territory here. The language throughout ‘A Shining’ is vague and sketchy and unspecific. I suppose it was meant to be dream-like and haunting.

“My mother was here. My father was here. I saw them right over there, yes, just there, right there. Right over there, yes. Or maybe it was here where I am now that I last saw my parents. Maybe they were standing right here where I am now. That’s possible, it may very well be that it was here. Yes, I almost think it was here. Yes, it was here. Now I am sure of it. It was here. Nowhere else. Not there, bu here. Here’s where. Maybe I can call out and ask where they are.”

After a couple of pages of this sleep-inducing prose, I am less than half awake. This is the longest 74-page book I have ever read.

It does not help that this entire novella is written as one long paragraph with no convenient stopping points. However I did find my own natural stopping points for the several times I fell into a sleepy trance due to the dullness of the prose.

As far as death allegories go, I found this to be an overly simplistic lame one. By keeping his allegory so general and unspecific, Jon Fosse has made sure it applies to no one.

Grade :    C-