An Alternative

     A few blogs back it was suggested that readers take up Jon Fosse's Septology. Apparently its length has intimidated some. MKV is reading it while wondering if she's smart enough for the task. She is. There's an alternative for someone who wants to read Fosse but not tackle Septology.

  That alternative is novella, 74 pages long, called The Shining. Reading it I wondered if I was smart enough to read it. This is some of what Betsy Read says about it in the Guardian. 

"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."

   So there you have it, an opportunity to read Fosse in about an hour. Reflecting on it will continue.

Takk for alt,

Al