A SHINING - JON FOSSE

I might have recently bit off more than I can chew, book wise. I’m in the middle of 4 very long books that are sort of stacking up against each other and proving somewhat hard to make real headway on. Plus, my life is a little crazy right now, and my patience is not where it needs to be for reading long tomes. But, that being said, I saw this super short volume at the English language bookstore here in Tokyo, where they had a lot of Fosse in these beautiful Fitzcarraldo Editions, and, knowing that he’d just won the Nobel, I decided to pick up the shortest one to see what was up. This thing is so short it’s borderline cheating to include it on this list. It’s between a novella and a short story, clocking in at under 50 pages. The whole thing is one long paragraph and a stream of thought narration from an unnamed man who (spoiler) wanders into a snowy forest and freezes to death. Or, at least, that’s one way to read it. It’s very strange. Fosse does an amazing job conjuring an atmosphere of listlessness and strangeness and, in his words “fear without anxiety.” The man never knows why he’s doing what he’s doing. He doesn’t know what’s compelled him to drive until he gets to the edge of the forest or why he enters it at dusk without any goal in mind as it begins to snow. We never learn much about him besides that he seems disaffected and alone and confused. He encounters various visions beyond his understanding, including an entity that speaks to him without being very helpful, an apparition of his parents and the titular shining, a bright supernatural light. The text is the man’s thoughts as he tries to understand what he’s seeing and why he’s doing what he’s doing. There’s no real closure or explanation, just a sense of shimmering strangeness. I really enjoyed it. It was digestible in a single sitting at a nice coffeeshop. It really nails a specific vibe and feeling, at once lonely and sad and spectral. I’m not sure if Fosse hits this tone in his other works, I know he’s referred to as the Beckett of the 21st century which suggests to me that he does, but I look forward to reading some more of his stuff.