If you’ve never felt literature’s somatic effects, perhaps you just haven’t encountered the right book—or been in the right place. In this following essay, Anna Mebel explores the perilous consequences of reading Jon Fosse on a plane, where the Norwegian author’s quieting haunting novella, A Shining, catalyzed a sudden contact with apparitions, anonymity, and death at thirty thousand feet up in the air. Where certain texts e may be escapist channels, others set us ever more firmly in our bodies.
I read Jon Fosse’s A Shining on the plane back to Houston after visiting my parents in Miami, having bought the book at the airport bookstore—a sleek black copy with gold branches on the cover that stood out among thrillers, romance novels, and self-help tomes. Why not a Nobel Prize winner, I thought, and a short book too—the perfect length for a three-hour flight and a better use of my time than a magazine I’d leave crumpled and half-read.
I’ve never been one to fear flying, though I’ve often thought about how an old poetry professor—now dead—had described the shape of the plane as a tomb, comparing the experience of flying to being buried alive. Even with the recent rash of freak aviation accidents (growing more frequent by the day during the Trump administration), I still comforted myself with the logic that the odds of anything catastrophic befalling me were tiny. I boarded my plane listening to ambient harp music, and when I got to my seat, I wedged A Shining into the metal contraption that passes for a seat pocket on a Spirit flight.
Translated from Norwegian by Damion Searls, the novel opens with Jon Fosse’s signature plainspoken prose— “I was taking a drive. It was nice.” Searls describes Fosse’s style as “unexcerptable as Philip Glass symphonies or Béla Tarr tracking shots,” and true to this sense of cohesion, A Shining is composed of one paragraph, urging one to read it in a single sitting, further enhancing the novel’s immersive qualities. Because Fosse’s writing favors repetition and long, incantatory sentences, specific details like “soft little snowflakes,” “tractor,” and “hot sausage in a bun” become oases of sensory beauty—bas-reliefs on an otherwise flat, nondescript surface.
The plot of A Shining is simple: an unnamed narrator goes on a drive, gets lost in the woods, and encounters something inexplicable—the titular shining. With no reason behind the journey besides boredom, he takes a series of half-deliberated turns until his car becomes stuck in a rut at the end of a forest road. He leaves the car, ostensibly to find help, but instead walks deeper into the cold, dark woods, as if compelled by a supernatural force. His initial sense of boredom and purposelessness then gives way to dread and fear, but he manages to talk himself down. The terror is unfounded. Surely, he can find someone to help him with his car and make it to his hot sausage and bun for dinner.
Our narrator has few specifying qualities. We know little about him other than that he lives alone and sometimes forgets to eat for several days—no name, no luminous moments from childhood, no occupation, no sense of who he might’ve loved or hated; his fears and uncertainties are rooted in archetype, not individualized character. The character’s lack of identifying features also gives an elasticity to his narration, creating a one-size-fits-all consciousness that’s easy to slip into as a reader. One can sense, however, that what leads him to his demise is an extreme loneliness. Perhaps we’re all lonely and anonymous in our approach towards death, towards the divine, or whatever the “shining whiteness” is that the narrator encounters.
Like Dante meeting Virgil in the middle of his life, the narrator is stranded deep in a dark forest, with no way back. In this austere predicament, the narrator initially longs for creature comforts like hot food and warmth, and these bodily yearnings distract him from sensing the surrounding void. As the narrator journeys further, however, reality gives way to something out of a fable; after encountering “the shining presence,” he meets his dead parents. His father stands mostly silent next to his mother, who nags and nags as she must have in life, calling out to the narrator in a voice both like her own and not. Here, the novel terrifies with small slippages and modulations in language, creating a deliberate uncertainty. Is it his mother that he sees or an apparition? Does he hallucinate the yellow moon, the shining stars, their disappearance into darkness? He says, “[My parents] were just standing in front of me, even if they were a long way away. But I walked toward them, and they walked toward me, but we were walking so slowly. We walked, we both walked, they did, I did, but it was like we didn’t get any closer to each other, actually it was really strange, impossible to understand, to tell the truth.” The landscape transforms from the ordinary—traversed in boredom—to the menacing, and the simplicity of Fosse’s language makes an eerily vivid tableau out of the narrator’s final absorption into the shining fog.
On my flight, I had only ten pages remaining when the pilot announced that we’d been circling the Gulf for the past forty minutes. The plane couldn’t land because a thunderstorm was then raging over Houston, illuminating the tall clouds beneath us in bright flashes. We flew high above the storm and couldn’t hear the thunder, but my heart pounded just the same, reading A Shining and becoming convinced that any ordinary day, any ordinary choice, could lead one towards death. All those cavalier thoughts about the improbability of plane crash—gone. The novel urged its readers to apprehend the delicate scrim separating the living and the dead, and in its wake, I felt genuine, full-body fear. The closest I’d been to this kind of fear was falling asleep one night and becoming overwhelmed by the loneliness of dying someday—the certainty of it happening, and the uncertainty of what it will be like. That fear arose in the cozy comfort of home, blooming in the desolate half-consciousness between reality and dream, but at least it had been abstract—whereas the plane was a very real large hunk of metal improbably circling above a thunderstorm, looking for a break in the clouds. Nobody around me panicked, or at least not outwardly, making me feel like the sole living consciousness amidst ghosts. The harsh white of the reading light made my hands look sickly. My wrists ached from holding the novel open, as did my neck from stooping down to read it. Like the narrator’s hunger in the novel, the pain brought me back to my body, making me feel more fragile and fiercely alive.
In an interview in the New Yorker, Jon Fosse describes a near-death experience at age twelve, noting that it was the singular most formative event for him as a person and an artist: “Everything was shimmering and very peaceful, a very happy state, like a cloud of particles of light.” It is not unlike the shining described in the novel, or coastal clouds in the night sky illuminated by lightning.
Fosse grew up in a small rural community by the Hardangerfjord, in the village of Strandebarm. At that latitude (not quite as north as Fairbanks, Alaska, but north of St. Petersburg, Russia), the nights are white in the summers and the days are dark in the winters. Living in the village, the writer had heard the waves hitting the fjord—strong waves, soft waves, a repetitive, rhythmic music, and this sound echoes throughout his pages; the critic Diana Ciot-Monda calls Fosse’s prose “wavy,” immersive in its meditative qualities, like sitting on a beach with your eyes closed. Throughout all his work, Fosse’s writing reflects the environs that raised him: the harshness of the Nordic light, the feeling of being stranded in a remote and wintry corner of the world. I felt something similar on that circling plane, stranded in the sky. Briefly I could recognize Galveston below us, a dimly illuminated beach with its own rhythmic waves.
As Fosse says, “literature is also a way of learning to die.” When the plane finally started its descent, the imposing clouds gave way to a white haze, and I saw grids of suburban houses, the illuminated blue squares of the occasional pool, tiny car lights on the freeway, a house just like my parent’s new house in the suburbs, the chain restaurant where we went for my dad’s birthday, my parents doing their weekend shopping at Costco, my dead grandmother’s razed house in Kharkiv, the cat that ran away when I was a child, the whole of my life in miniature, laid out below me. . . I had become so immersed in the rhythm of Fosse’s sentences that my flight had merged into the novel, and his narrative logic blended with my own memories. Holding the slim novel in my hands, I felt closer than ever to death, and when the wheels of the plane finally hit the runway, I felt like I had just managed to avoid it.
Anna Mebel holds an MFA from Syracuse University. Her writing has received support from the Vermont Studio Center and has appeared or is forthcoming in The Iowa Review, Gulf Coast, Wigleaf, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a novel.
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