A Shining WINNER OF THE 2023 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

(Paperback)

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A man starts driving without knowing where he is going. He alternates be-tween turning right and left, and finally he gets stuck at the end of a forest road. Soon it gets dark and starts to snow, but instead of going back to find help, he ventures, foolishly, into the dark forest. Inevitably, the man gets lost, and as he grows cold and tired, he encounters a glowing being amid the obscu-rity. Strange, haunting and dreamlike, A Shining is the latest work of fiction by Jon Fosse, 'the Beckett of the twenty-first century' (Le Monde).

Reviews

A Shiningcan be read in many ways: as a realistic monologue; as a fable; as a Christian-inflected allegory; as a nightmare painstakingly recounted the next morning, the horror of the experience still pulsing under the words, though somewhat mitigated by the small daily miracle of daylight. I think the great splendour of Fosses 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. This refusal to succumb to the solitary, the stark, the simple, the binary to insist that complicated things like death and God retain their immense mysteries and contradictions seems, in this increasingly partisan world of ours, a quietly powerful moral stance.
Lauren Groff,Guardian

Fosses prose doesnt speak so much as witnesses, unfolds, accumulates. It flows like consciousness itself. This is perhaps why A Shining feels so momentous, even at fewer than 50 pages. You never quite know where youre going. But it doesnt matter: you want to follow, to move in step ith the rhythm of these words.
Matthew Janney, Financial Times

We are in the presence of rare literary greatness. It is for this greatness that the Swedish Academy has justly awarded Jon Fosse the Nobel prize.
Paul Binding, Times Literary Supplement

The translation by Damion Searls perfectly judges the pitch and rhythm producing a natural reading beat. [...]A Shiningis a neat example of Fosses gift for portraying porous psychological states, and its publication is perfectly timed for a satisfying Samhain evening read.
Rnn Hession,Irish Times

A Shinings marked by what is perhaps Fosses defining skill: his ability to effortlessly marry the mundane and the sublime. The author is himself a practicing Catholic; he was received into the Church in 2012, and a certain spiritual seriousness is at the heart of his works power, even while their spirit everywhere shuns the dogmatic. Expect from Fosse neither the supposedly infallible truths of the pulpit nor Scriptures resonant cadence. The experience of reading him is of a different order entirely, one more humble, and perhaps as illuminating.
Luke Warde,Sunday Independent

In this spare tale of disorientation and longing, by the winner of this years Nobel Prize in Literature, a man gets stranded on a back road in a forest and wanders deep into the trees. Fosse uses fleeting allusions to a world beyond the reach of the narrator to explore some of humanitys most elusive pursuits, certainty and inviolability among them. His bracingly clear prose imbues the storys ambiguities with a profundity both revelatory and familiar.
New Yorker

Jon Fosse is a major European writer.
Karl Ove Knausgaard, author ofThe Wolves of Eternity

The Beckett of the twenty-first century.
Le Monde

Fosse has been compared to Ibsen and to Beckett, and it is easy to see his work as Ibsen stripped down to its emotional essentials. But it is much more. For one thing, it has a fierce poetic simplicity.
New York Times

Jon Fosse has managed, like few others, to carve out a literary form of his own.
Nordic Council Literary Prize

A deeply moving experience. At times while reading thefirst two books ofSeptology, I walked around in a fugue-likestate, wondering what it was that I was reading, exactly. Aparable A gospel A novel bereft of the usual markings ofplot, time, and character The answer appeared to be all ofthe above, but although I usually balk at anything mystical,the effect was haunting and cumulative ... I hesitate tocompare the experience of reading these works to the act ofmeditation. But that is the closest I can come to describinghow something in the critical self is shed in the processof reading Fosse, only to be replaced by something moreprimal. A mood. An atmosphere. The sound of wordsmoving on a page.
Ruth Margalit,New York Review of Books

Fosses fusing of the commonplace and the existential,together with his dramatic forays into the past, make for arelentlessly consuming work:Septologyfeels momentous.
Catherine Taylor,Guardian

WithSeptology, Fosse has found a new approach to writingfiction, different from what he has written before and it isstrange to say, as the novel enters its fifth century differentfrom what has been written before.Septologyfeels new.
Wyatt Mason,Harpers

Having read the Norwegian writer Jon Fosses Septology,an extraordinary seven-novel sequence about an old mansrecursive reckoning with the braided realities of God, art,identity, family life and human life itself, Ive come into aweand reverence myself for idiosyncratic forms of immensemetaphysical fortitude.
Randy Boyagoda,New York Times

[P]alpable in this book is the way that the writing is meantto replicate the pulse and repetitive phrasing of liturgicalprayer. Asle is a Catholic convert and, in Damion Searlssliquid translation, his thoughts are rendered in long run-onsentences whose metronomic cadences conjure the intake andouttake of breath, or the reflexive motions of fingers telling arosary. These unique books ask you to engage with the sensesrather than the mind, and their aim is to bring about themomentary dissolution of the self.
Sam Sacks,Wall Street Journal

The translation by Damion Searls is deserving of specialrecognition. His rendering of this remarkable single run-on sentence over three volumes is flawless. The rhythms,the shifts in pace, the nuances in tone are all conveyed withmasterful understatement. TheSeptologyseries is among thehighlights of my reading life.
Rnn Hession,Irish Times

Fosse intuitively and with great artistry conveys ... asense of wonder at the unfathomable miracle of life, even inits bleakest and loneliest moments.
Bryan Karetnyk,Financial Times

Author Bio

Damion Searls is a translator from German, Norwegian, French and Dutch, and a writer in English. He has translated nine books by Jon Fosse, including the three books of Septology.