Jon Fosse, A Shining
Transit Books / Fitzcarraldo, 2023
A New Yorker Best Book of the Year
A World Literature Today Notable Translation of the Year
Finalist for the inaugural Cercador Prize
In Fosse’s first novel since his acclaimed Septology, a man feels himself at a loss and just starts driving. He turns right, then left, then right, and ultimately finds himself stuck at the end of a forest road. It soon grows dark and starts to snow. But he ventures into the dark woods.
“ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 5/5
A perfect introduction to the Nobel Prize-winning author’s work… The prose in A Shining is radiant, as if Fosse were sculpting it in light.”
— The Telegraph
“If [the 670-page Septology] is a daunting entry point, I bring you tidings of great joy: A Shining is only 75 pages long and made up of short, simple sentences; it’s also, somehow, a luminous and subtle rewriting of the entire Divine Comedy…. A Shining (beautifully and brilliantly translated, as was Septology, by Damion Searls) affords an excellent occasion to make a stronger case for why reading Fosse is a singular and transporting experience.”
— The New York Times
“In this spare tale of disorientation and longing, [Fosse’s] bracingly clear prose imbues the story’s ambiguities with a profundity both revelatory and familiar.” — The New Yorker
“[Fosse’s] fiction rather astonishingly dissolves the border between the material and the spiritual worlds... 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…, [but] 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… 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.” — Lauren Groff, The Guardian
“At once a concise and fable-like summation of the larger themes that Fosse has worked his entire career towards delineating while also a baffling, oneiric, and deeply strange novel that totally resists comprehensibility, clarity and closure. It might be the worst place to start with Fosse, but only because it is so perfectly and completely Fosse-ian. Reading it first is like spending your first night of drinking slamming shots of absinthe; it wouldn’t give you a necessarily representative idea of ‘alcohol’ but it still might be the most alcoholic drink possible. Let’s chase the green fairy then!” — Evan Reads
“A man ventures into a dark forest, where he is confronted by some kind of amorphous, luminous presence—the ‘shining’ of the title…. A Shining feels momentous, even at fewer than 50 pages. You never quite know where you’re going. But it doesn’t matter: you want to follow, to move in step with the rhythm of these words…. The writing is transporting and moving and painful; it’s writing that forces a reckoning with the part of us who also feels alone in the woods, and wants to be rescued and brought towards the light.”
— Financial Times
“Though publishers see long stories as something of a misfit in marketing terms, I’m a fan of them – they’re the perfect length for an immersive single-sitting read… The translation by Damion Searls perfectly judges the pitch and rhythm of this mental flow, producing a natural reading beat.”
— Rónán Hession, Irish Times
Publisher / UK Publisher / Amazon
Also by Jon Fosse:
Septology
Melancholy I-II
Aliss at the Fire
Morning and Evening
Scenes from a Childhood (stories)
How It Was (a play, PDF free online)