Vaim
Jon Fosse
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From the publisher
Translated by Damion Searls
Winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature
Jatgeir has come from Vaim to the big city, Bjørgvin, on his wooden boat, Eline, named after the long-lost love of his teenage years. He intends to buy a needle and thread to sew a button but he is cheated, twice. That night, while sleeping on his boat, he hears a familiar voice: unexpectedly, it is Eline, who wants to come home to Vaim with him. She leaves a note for her husband Frank, packs her bags and runs away while he is out fishing. Vaim, Jon Fosse’s first novel since he received the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature, is the story of this triangle, a novel about little boats and big boats, love and death, passive men and an incredibly determined woman. And all, of course, was strange…
‘The repetitive, ritual practice of sitting in communal silence is also one of the best metaphors for what reading Fosse is like. Through his quiet, rhythmic prose, something almost divine becomes faintly visible…. In the end, Vaim is as strange and surprising as life itself, drifting away from any expected course.’
— Bekah Waalkes, Financial Times
‘Exhilarating… Vaim is full of doubts about language and communicability, ambivalence around word choice; narrators grasp mutely at those things and feelings that cannot be articulated, and events that in a traditional novel would be major climaxes transpire almost without comment. Language does not build a world here – its faults make the world’s solidity crumble. Instead of the comfort of object permanence, in Vaim, we’re carried along in the anxious mutability of drift, wake, current, float.’
— Ania Szremski, 4 Columns
‘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
‘We are in the presence of rare literary greatness. It is for this greatness that the Swedish Academy has justly awarded Jon Fosse the Nobel prize.’
— Paul Binding, Times Literary Supplement
‘The Beckett of the twenty-first century.’
— Le Monde
‘Jon Fosse is a major European writer.’
— Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of The Wolves of Eternity