The Nobel announcement this year came with particular delight to us at Asymptote, as it perfectly coincided with our Book Club partnership with Transit Books to bring you Jon Fosse’s latest offering in English, the surreal and contemplative A Shining. Written in the Norwegian author’s singular blend of contemplation and poetic prowess, the novella is a metaphysical tale of mystery given physicality, a masterful portrayal of what we’re wandering in—and what we’re wandering towards.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title. 

A Shining by Jon Fosse, translated from the Norwegian, Transit, 2023

On October 5, 2023, the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, with the committee lauding ‘his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable’. This preoccupation with the unsayable is ever present in Fosse’s work, and in A Shining, the latest title by the author to appear in Damion Searls’ translation, it takes the form of an entity, a shimmering outline of a being, appearing to the novella’s narrator in the forest. This spiritual encounter pulses at the bounds of language, at the threshold of the divine. Recounted in Fosse’s characteristic style—rhythmic, cyclical, flowing like a cascade—the slender volume offers an introduction to its author at the height of his powers.

Long before becoming a Nobel laureate, to speak of Fosse was (and perhaps still is) to speak in hushed and reverent tones. In a piece on the ‘incantatory power’ of Fosse’s work for The Atlantic, Damion Searls shares that, after encountering a German translation, he began learning Norwegian just so that he could translate the author’s Norwegian Nynorsk—in Fosse’s words a ‘rare language’, spoken in the west of the country by roughly a tenth of the population. In a similar note of awe, literary critic Merve Emre has described Fosse’s Septology, a seven-volume, three-tome masterwork written in one long sentence, as ‘the only novel I have read that has made me believe in the reality of the divine’. But for readers who may shy away from Septology’s many pages, A Shining is perhaps a welcome alternative, as a novella that reveals a glimpse of Fosse’s singular mystery—in condensed form. READ MORE…