A glimpse of the world beyond

Jon Fosse, a Norwegian novelist and playwright who just won the Nobel Prize for literature, begins his new novella, A Shining, in a way that evokes the opening lines of Dante’s Divine Comedy. The first-person narrator wanders away from familiar paths and gets lost in a dark wood. It is the beginning of one man’s journey toward God, a pilgrimage from darkness to light.

Fosse, an advocate for what he calls “slow prose,” allows his luminous narrative to unfold at a dreamlike pace. The narrator’s car gets stuck on a deeply rutted road in the forest. He walks to find help and gets lost. Along the way he perceives various manifestations of the holy—a light that is vested with personhood, a presence, a voice. In the most explicitly biblical reference, he asks the presence, “Who are you?” and is told, “I am who I am,” the same answer Moses received when he asked a similar question. Later, the narrator encounters his parents and, finally, a barefooted man dressed in a black suit who leads him into the light.

The ineffable nature of the narrator’s experience is conveyed through paradox. In this way, Fosse uses words to point to the limit of words. His parents look like his parents, and they don’t look anything like his parents. His mother’s voice is “both very nearby and very far away at the same time.” His experience is “like being locked into a closed room in the forest, trapped, but at the same time it’s like the room is unbounded.”