Vaim - by Jon Fosse (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

By Nobel Laureate in Literature Jon Fosse, Vaim begins a trilogy of novels set in a remote Norwegian fishing village.

Jatgeir travels from the fishing village of Vaim to the city in search of a needle and thread. Cheated twice, he returns to his boat, where he falls asleep as waves rock the hull. Soon he is awakened by a voice: a woman is calling his name from the quay. There stands Eline, the secret love of his youth--and the namesake of his boat--with a packed suitcase. Eline pleads to come aboard. In what follows, this single encounter reverberates across three stories: three narrators, three deaths.

The first new work from Jon Fosse since he was awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature, Vaim is a spectral novel that wanders and watches, imbued with things half-seen, perhaps not of this world yet still caught in its rhythms. The first in a trilogy of novels, it continues his investigation into the human condition: the subtle encounters that come to define our lives and our deaths, and what lies in the threshold between what is and what is longed for.

Review Quotes

"Septology is the only novel I have read that has made me believe in the reality of the divine, as the fourteenth-century theologian Meister Eckhart, whom Fosse has read intently, describes it: 'It is in darkness that one finds the light, so when we are in sorrow, then this light is nearest of all to us.' None of the comparisons to other writers seem right. Bernhard? Too aggressive. Beckett? Too controlling. Ibsen? 'He is the most destructive writer I know, ' Fosse claims. 'I feel that there's a kind of--I don't know if it's a good English word--but a kind of reconciliation in my writing. Or, to use the Catholic or Christian word, peace.'"--Merve Emre, The New Yorker

"An extraordinary seven-novel sequence about an old man's recursive reckoning with the braided realities of God, art, identity, family life and human life itself... The books feel like the culminating project of an already major career."--Randy Boyagoda, The New York Times

"With Septology, Fosse has found a new approach to writing fiction, different from what he has written before and--it is strange to say, as the novel enters its fifth century--different from what has been written before. Septology feels new."--Wyatt Mason, Harper's Magazine

"I hesitate to compare the experience of reading these works to the act of meditation. But that is the closest I can come to describing how something in the critical self is shed in the process of reading Fosse, only to be replaced by something more primal. A mood. An atmosphere. The sound of words moving on a page." --Ruth Margalit, The New York Review of Books

"In The Other Name's rhythmic accumulation of words, [there is] something incantatory and self-annihilating--something that feels almost holy."--Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

"It ties 2666 by Roberto Bolaño as my favorite book from the 21st century... What I read was nothing less than a desperate prayer made radiant by sudden spikes of ecstatic beauty."--Lauren Groff, Literary Hub

"The Other Name trembles with the beauty, doubt, and gnostic weariness of great religious fiction. In Fosse's hands, God is a difficult, pungent, overwhelmingly aesthetic force, 'the invisible inside the visible.'"--Dustin Illingworth, The Nation

"Fosse's portrait of intersecting lives is that rare metaphysical novel that readers will find compulsively readable."--Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

"Fosse's fusing of the commonplace and the existential, together with his dramatic forays into the past, make for a relentlessly consuming work: already Septology feels momentous."--The Guardian

"Its striking characters and whiplash prose make for compulsive reading, engrossing from the start, unforgettable at the end."--World Literature Today

"Fosse has written a strange mystical moebius strip of a novel, in which an artist struggles with faith and loneliness, and watches himself, or versions of himself, fall away into the lower depths. The social world seems distant and foggy in this profound, existential narrative, which is only the first part of what promises to be a major work of Scandinavian fiction." --Hari Kunzru, author of White Tears

"Hypnotic, soothing, intellectually reverent. Damion Searls is the perfect translator for Fosse's unending sentences, that repeat and circle back on themselves with mathematical beauty, creating some of the most significant literature I've read on alcoholism, faith, and artmaking I can remember. Septology could fill a hundred volumes, and I would read forever."--Spencer Ruchti, Third Place Books (Seattle, WA)

"The further away I get from this, the more convinced I am that it is a genuine masterpiece...I put everything else away. I needed the rhythm of Fosse's sentence, his intractable Catholicism, his symphonic prayer. It soothed my brain with sadness, the way only something truly beautiful can."--Bee, Pegasus Books (Berkeley, CA)

"Jon Fosse is a major European writer."--Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of My Struggle

"Masterful ... From the very first word, I wanted to read the book straight through in one go. ... A brilliant novel. ... Fosse's way of "painting" pictures in words is gripping and truly different from what can be found in any other literature. ... A simplified universe full of wonder, intensity, and warm humor."--Gro Jørstad Nilsen, Bergens Tidende

About the Author

Jon Fosse is one of Norway's most celebrated authors and playwrights, and was awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was born in 1959 on the west coast of Norway and is the recipient of countless prestigious prizes, both in his native Norway and abroad. Since his 1983 fiction debut, Raudt, svart [Red, Black], Fosse has written prose, poetry, essays, short stories, children's books, and over forty plays, with more than a thousand productions performed and translations into fifty languages.

Damion Searls is a translator from German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch and a writer in English. He has translated many classic modern writers, including Proust, Rilke, Nietzsche, Walser, Ingeborg Bachmann, Alfred Döblin, Jon Fosse, Elfriede Jelinek, and Nescio.