I was reading a book. It was good. It felt good to be reading. I didn’t know where the story was going. I was just reading. Curiosity had taken hold of me. So I just read. I was reading Jon Fosse’s A Shining from 2023. It was translated by Damian Searls In the same year I think, yes, in the same year. It was very short. Only forty pages. So I just read it. When I got to the end of a left page I moved to the right page and when I got to the end of a right page I moved to the next left page. I just kept reading. Eventually I got to a forest, or the narrator did, yes, it was the narrator. He had been driving a car because he was bored and he was now in a forest, lost in a forest in late autumn, so late in the day, and it was getting dark. So while I was reading the book and following the story he was lost in the forest and was following a path until he was lost, yes, he was lost in the forest and it was starting to snow. He was scared he would die. But did he want to die. He didn’t know. He was tired and wanted to find his way back to his car. But it was so dark and he didn’t know which way to go. So he went all ways. He was alone in the forest, all alone and lost deep in the dark woods, yes. But he was not alone. He may have been alone. But there was a presence. A shining presence. I was curious about the presence. I believed it was there. I had my doubts it was there. Yes it was there if the narrator said it was there. He wasn’t sure it was there. So was it there. It must have been. It was there on the page. Yes, it was core to the story. But what did it mean. I had an idea. I had several ideas. It was that sort of book. It could be he was near death, yes it read that way. The narrator had an empty life and he revealed little of it. The path he lost could have been a spiritual search for God, yes it could have been that. Maybe it was about depression or maybe addiction as it all began when he was bored. My hunt for meaning was like the narrator’s hunt for meaning. We were both looking for meaning in this book. It had the minimalism of Beckett, yes. But its spare prose shone through a wall of words. Lovely words, yes. Hypnotic words. They felt good to read.
