I had probably never done anything much worse than this, first getting my car stuck and then walking into the forest to look for help, really, what could have made me think I’d be able to find help in the forest, in the dark woods…

I’m working on a review of Jon Fosse’s Septology for… another outlet. As you may recall, Fosse is the latest winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Like Sigrid Undset, he’s a Norwegian author who converted to Roman Catholicism, though his writing is nothing like Undset’s. I got his recent novella, A Shining, too, and there’s nothing stopping my reviewing that one here.

The first peculiarity one notices when reading Septology (of which this is not a review) is that the entire book – and it’s a long one – is one sentence. Not a single period there for the reader to rest on, like a swimmer at sea looking for an island. A Shining is less radical in that regard – it does have sentences, but there are no paragraphs. It’s a stream of consciousness story, in which we follow the unnamed narrator on a dream-like journey, to a destination about which we can only speculate.

The narrator describes how he drives his car out into the country, and then, on a whim, into the forest, where the vehicle gets stuck on a dirt road just as snow begins to fall. Incredibly, he decides to look for help by walking up a forest path, and before long he’s utterly lost. Then he encounters a shining “presence” whom he does not understand (but the reader can guess), followed by other apparitions.

One does not read a Fosse story for the plot. It’s all character, in a very immersive way. The narrator, wise or foolish, shares his every thought – sometimes to the reader’s frustration. The mystery of the story is what the narrator actually wants (he doesn’t know), and where he’s going (which he also doesn’t know).

The Christianity of A Shining is obscure and far from explicit, but the trip is absorbing if you give it a chance. Not light reading, but worth it if this kind of story intrigues you.