Recommend: No.
I was taking a drive. It was nice. It felt good to be moving. I didn’t know where I was going. I was just driving. Boredom had taken hold of me – usually I was never bored but now I had fallen prey to it. I couldn’t think of anything I wanted to do. So I just did something. I got in my car and drove and when I got somewhere I could turn right or left I turned right, and at the next place I could turn right or left I turned right.
And so on goes this very slender 40 page novella. Jon Fosse has employed a distinctive drone throughout the whole story. Sentences are short and bland. One will end only to be repeated, with minor variations, a few lines later. There are no paragraphs.
I liked the ambiguous plot. A man drives aimlessly to a forest, gets lost, sees a shining apparition. I imagined the narrator was dying, off-screen. He does mention that it had been a while since he had seen anyone. I was recalling the movie All Of Us Strangers, where you see characters in a limbo state between life and death, in a world that physically mirrors the living.
The writing style was just too difficult for this book to be enjoyable. When you are looking forward to finishing a book and it’s only 40 pages, that is likely not a good sign.
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