A Shining

Reviews / Votes

'A Shining can 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 Fosse's 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? 'Fosse's prose doesn't 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 you're going. But it doesn't 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 Shining is a neat example of Fosse's gift for portraying porous psychological states, and its publication is perfectly timed for a satisfying Samhain evening read.'

- Ronan Hession, Irish Times? 'A Shining s marked by what is perhaps Fosse's 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 Scripture's 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 year's 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 humanity's most elusive pursuits, certainty and inviolability among them. His bracingly clear prose imbues the story's ambiguities with a profundity both revelatory and familiar.'

- New Yorker? 'The physical and otherworldly hinterland of A Shining through which Jon Fosse is the guide is at once terrifying and deeply reassuring.'

- Catherine Taylor, Times Literary Supplement? 'Jon Fosse is a major European writer.'

- Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of The 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 the first two books of Septology, I walked around in a fugue-like state, wondering what it was that I was reading, exactly. A parable? A gospel? A novel bereft of the usual markings of plot, time, and character? The answer appeared to be all of the above, but although I usually balk at anything mystical, the effect was haunting and cumulative ... I hesitate to compare the experience of reading these works to the act of meditation. But that is the closest I can come to describing how something in the critical self is shed in the process of reading Fosse, only to be replaced by something more primal. A mood. An atmosphere. The sound of words moving on a page.'

- Ruth Margalit, New York Review of Books 'Fosse's fusing of the commonplace and the existential, together with his dramatic forays into the past, make for a relentlessly consuming work: Septology feels momentous.'

- Catherine Taylor, Guardian 'With Septology, Fosse has found a new approach to writing fiction, different from what he has written before and - it is strange to say, as the novel enters its fifth century - different from what has been written before. Septology feels new.'

- Wyatt Mason, Harper's 'Having read the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse's "Septology", an extraordinary seven-novel sequence about an old man's recursive reckoning with the braided realities of God, art, identity, family life and human life itself, I've come into awe and reverence myself for idiosyncratic forms of immense metaphysical fortitude.'

- Randy Boyagoda, New York Times '[P]alpable in this book is the way that the writing is meant to replicate the pulse and repetitive phrasing of liturgical prayer. Asle is a Catholic convert and, in Damion Searls's liquid translation, his thoughts are rendered in long run-on sentences whose metronomic cadences conjure the intake and outtake of breath, or the reflexive motions of fingers telling a rosary. These unique books ask you to engage with the senses rather than the mind, and their aim is to bring about the momentary dissolution of the self.'

- Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal 'The translation by Damion Searls is deserving of special recognition. 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 with masterful understatement. The Septology series is among the highlights of my reading life.'

- Ronan Hession, Irish Times 'Fosse intuitively - and with great artistry - conveys ... a sense of wonder at the unfathomable miracle of life, even in its bleakest and loneliest moments.'

- Bryan Karetnyk, Financial Times