Vaim - by Jon Fosse (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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

Jatgeir has come from the small fishing village of Vaim to the big city on his boat, which he calls Eline. He wants to buy a needle and thread to mend a loose button. Instead, he finds Eline herself--the secret love of his youth, who has recently left her husband--who returns with him to the village.

Fosse's first work since receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature, Vaim comes to life through hypnotic prose and mordant wit, unfolding a world of boats, solitary fishermen, love, and death.

Review Quotes

"Nobel winner Fosse centers this spectacular story of loneliness, love, and death on three linked characters living in small-town Norway... This is unforgettable."--Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Fosse's intrepid, seductive, highly accomplished writing perfectly fits the intricate human truths he seeks to convey."--Eimear McBride, The Observer

"Vaim floats between states, intermingling life and death, present and past, an interstitial novel about lives that never quite arrive at their culmination."--Robert Rubsam, The Washington Post

"A mesmerizing little fable about--perhaps--patience, grace and fate...there is much to admire in Fosse's rhythmic prose, his bursts of humor and heightened sense of life's pervasive oddness."--Toby Lichtig, The Wall Street Journal

"How can prose that is so simple pulse with such feeling? How can it be so littoral, incarnating the light and spray and tidal tempos of these seascapes with such power? And how can a novelist make a reader feel so lost and so found at the same time? It is strange. A strange miracle."--The Guardian

"The novel's three movements, beautifully composed, are pattern-like rather than progressive in their exploration of the intersections between lives: Fosse might say 'musical.' Yet their careful measure doesn't diminish our sense of a shape determined by accidentality... We're entangled in knots of syntax and time, in the utterly riveting banalities that preoccupy people."--Amit Chaudhuri, The New Statesman

"A breathless line of prose that resists the conventions of contemporary fiction... Thought and feeling, memory and anticipation coexist and collide, suspending action and reflection...making the act of deliberation as consequential as the choice itself."--Leah Dworkin, BOMB Magazine (Editors' Choice)

"Immersive, even trance-like. Fosse's novels enter the strange, conversational cadence of another person's mind, their personal attunements and idiosyncratic desires...Vaim is as strange and surprising as life itself, drifting away from any expected course."--Bekah Waalkes, Financial Times

"Exhilarating... In Vaim, we're carried along in the anxious mutability of drift, wake, current, float."--Ania Szremski, 4Columns

"Mysterious and playful... the translation by Damion Searls is, as ever, excellently judged in its rhythms and tones."--The Irish Times

"Reading Jon Fosse is always a curious and wondrous experience. Vaim is no exception: it ferries the reader along the stream of the 'ordinary mind, ' from which suddenly shines forth a luminous beyond."--Xiaolu Guo, author of Call Me Ishmaelle

"Three residents of a coastal Norwegian town ponder life, love, and what might've been... A fine portrait of uncertainty."--Kirkus Reviews

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.