A man goes for a drive, begins to drive aimlessly, finds himself down in a forested area, and his car gets stuck. He decides to walk away to find help. It starts to snow, gets dark, he can’t find his way back to the car, becomes afraid and cold. A white anthropomorphic figure approaches him and the author becomes warmer, then the figure puts his arm around his shoulder. The writer is helpless, confused and asks the figure who it is and the response “I am who I am.” He says he lives by himself, there is no one who miss him, and he can’t remember the last time someone came to visit him. His mum and dad appear and they’re lost too. A querulous mother, a semi-mute father, and a son who says he can’t remember ever calling out to his parents. A barefoot man in a black suit with a white shirt appears and offers his hand to the writer/parents. They advanced into a white, shimmering cloud.

The 2023 Nobel Prize for Literature was won by Jon Fosse so I felt compelled (his books should be engaging, right?) to read one of his books and this one was the only one available through interlibrary loan. It’s a slim novella, no chapters, no paragraphs, run on sentences, stream of consciousness monologue, so enervating that I had to force myself to finish every single page. To what purpose was the novella written; recounting a dream, a recreational drug induced hallucination, third man factor, meditation, out of body experience, or a what happens when you die scenario? ( )

This work was written as one long stream of consciousness, which made it a little difficult to follow at first. The more I read, however, and became familiar with the voice, the more compelling it became to understand what was happening to the main character in the forest. The book is like reading the thoughts of a man who has lost his way and is at the end of his life, documenting for himself the transition from life to death, including the presence of God. ( )

A novella by the new Nobel Prize winner about a man who drives until his car gets stuck, who walks until he cannot see. His continually swirling throughts during this journey form an allegory of a liffe as well as what happens to him.

5*