If God spoke Norwegian

Jon Fosse, 2023 Nobel laureate, writes mysterious, beautiful and deeply religious novels. His latest is a shining example

A SHINING by Jon Fosse, tr Damion Searls 48pp, Fitzcarraldo, T £9.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP£9.99

Jon Fosse’s new novella is as simple as a Biblical tale. One night, a man drives into a forest, to the end of a silent track. He stops his car, gets out, and walks ahead into the trees. There he meets a luminous presence – which also manifests as his parents, a suited man, and perhaps a whispering voice – and at the end he embraces it. He narrates this all in a measured tone, as if the encounter were inevitable. The book, A Shining, is just 48 pages long.

Fosse, who won the Nobel Prize last week, is not in the least obscure. He has been writing – in Nynorsk, a form of Norwegian – for more than 40 years, and he may be the most produced living playwright in Europe. But in Britain, his plays are rarely seen on stage, and his novels began to appear only five years ago. It’s thanks to Fitzcarraldo Editions, and the devotion of translator Damion Searls, that Fosse’s stature in this country should grow at last.

Fosse has called Beckett his “literary father”, and their first-personal styles can look alike. A Shining has litanies of questions, an oscillation between thoughts, a refraction of daily minutiae through a philosophical prism. But where Beckett’s fiction introspects, and seems buffeted by self-doubt, Fosse’s has eerie momentum, as if impelled by a higher power. He converted to Catholicism in

2012, leaving behind his wayward years; now he writes novels whose ground and material is God. Each novel in his sequence Septology (201921) – in which a man’s lifetime of memories unspools – begins in contemplation of a painted cross, and concludes with the narrator, Asle, at prayer.

The prose in A Shining is radiant, as if Fosse were sculpting it in light. In Septology, God was described as the “shining darkness” within our souls; here, the figure in the forest recalls the vision of Christ that begins the Book of Revelation – his head and hair like wool or snow, his eyes like a flame of fire. After that figure vanishes, the narrator thinks, “whatever it was it wasn’t a person, but, yes, well, it wasn’t a ghost either, but maybe, maybe, maybe it was actually an angel, maybe it was an angel of God”.

Fiction critics too often use “dreamlike”: it’s almost never accurate. But for Fosse’s writing, it is – both because dreams have a compulsive logic, and because they rework, in thin disguise, the many dreams we’ve had before. Fosse’s books, too, share motifs: people gaze at water, strange lights appear some distance off. The characters in Septolog y are named Asle, Ales, Aliss, Åsleik – like slivers of a single being. His theatrical ones are often called “Woman” or “Man”, as if in thought-experiments. No character in A Shining is individuated by a name.

Fosse once used the label “slow prose” to describe his work, though “gradual” might be better. His bestknown pupil is Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose obsessive self-study produced My Struggle (2009-11). Where Fosse’s attention is sacred, Knausgaard’s is secular, but as Searls has pointed out, neither writer benefits from excerption. A chunk of A Shining, as quoted above, sounds unremarkable, yet its effect is cumulative: emotion amasses over the pages, and hangs like a pedal tone. I believe Searls when he writes, in a recent Paris Review piece, that translating Fosse made him weep. (He doesn’t, or can’t, explain why.)

As figures shift through Fosse’s frames, whether the small spectral group of A Shining or the larger ones of Aliss at the Fire and Septology, it seems melancholic, as if everyone were always vanishing. But maybe that’s all memory is: the study of ongoing loss.

I read four of Fosse’s books on a break from reading the shortlist for the Booker Prize, and it’s hard to describe the effect. Those realist novels with unhappy families or satirical intent – many well-crafted, many clever – set against Fosse’s light, they seemed to melt away. A Shining is transcendental and offers us what contemporary culture rarely does: a glimpse, however slim, of the world that lies beyond.

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