I'm Gonna Shine Out in the Wild Silence

On Jon Fosse's "A Shining"

The Nobel Prize brings a lot of things: a new honorific, a cash prize, a speech in front of a bunch of Swedes, a rush of demand for your backlist¹, a week’s worth of attention, an essay or two in each major newspaper, a big ol’ sticker put on your books for the foreseeable future, and increased expectations for whatever book comes out next.² Jon Fosse’s A Shining was written long before he was awarded the prize, and it is only coincidentally Fosse’s first new release in English since the prize was awarded, and, well, just look at that big ol’ golden circle on the cover: this may very well be many people’s first exposure to the work of the newly crowned Nobel Laureate Jon Fosse.³

And what a strange introduction it would be, as A Shining (translated by Damion Searls) is 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!