Vaim

Novel · 134 pages · Hardcover · 2025 · Transit Books

An anecdote in a stranger’s head

Jon Fosse’s Vaim, translated by Damion Searls, spends half its length in the head of Jatgeir, an ageing bachelor with a motorboat. Two men who outlive him narrate the rest. Like him, each lives alone. Each carries only parts of him.

Jatgeir has lived in his childhood house in Vaim since his parents died. One summer night Eline, the girl he named his boat after, wakes him in Sund and asks to be taken home, away from her husband. He has wanted her for “a year and a day”. Fosse sets the wish beside his dread of her tidying his house. His pretext for the trip to Bjørgvin was a needle and thread. He paid 250 kroner for it twice, in the city and in Sund.

Elias, his only friend in Vaim, narrates the middle section years later. It is nearly Christmas. Jatgeir has not called for “a year and a day”. Jatgeir was his only visitor until Eline moved in. In Elias’s telling she climbed aboard and Jatgeir failed to get her off. Jatgeir had asked her to stay.

The last section belongs to Olaf, the husband Eline left and always called Frank. He too lived on in his parents’ house. At their first meeting Eline told him he would not be lonely anymore. Years after leaving him, she knocks at his door, the first knock he has heard in “a year and a day”, and moves him into the house Jatgeir left her. All three men use that phrase, each for a stretch spent alone. The first story Olaf hears about Jatgeir is the Sund shopkeeper’s, shrieking over the 250 kroner Jatgeir hid from Eline. A man the novel inhabits for half its pages ends as an anecdote in a stranger’s head.

Vaim has no full stop. Its blocks run up to 5,500 words. The book is short and slow. Elias’s knocking shows what that length does. He hears a knock and resolves to go to the hall and open the door, no more dawdling. The resolve recurs almost word for word. Each time the knock changes. He is a doorway further on. The sentence fixes his intention and moves everything around it. Shame starts the delay. The dirty dishes and books in every room, the mess of a man living alone, stall the visit he wants, and he opens the door on nobody. Later Jatgeir calls and leaves within minutes. Men at the quay say he drowned hours before. The visitor was dead.

That method fails Eline, and it costs the men too. The three share one idiom. The middle voice runs for pages before Jatgeir names it Elias. Three accounts read as one voice. For the men, repetition revises. Jatgeir wonders within minutes whether they kissed, and Elias tries the prank theory twice as if new. In Jatgeir’s monologue Eline still blushes and withdraws remarks. By Olaf’s she speaks in fixed orders. The name Frank plays on a loop. Jatgeir and Olaf both credit her with reading their minds. The book reads none of hers. Jatgeir had a monologue of his own. Eline, in this first book of three, has none. The comedy of Olaf’s obedience runs on her as a mechanism, for pages after the joke has landed. She sends him upstairs again to check heaters he knows are off.

Burial is the one arrangement Eline cannot direct. She wanted to lie beside Jatgeir, but Elias died before her and took the plot. Her demand to have him dug up failed, so the displaced friend lies between them. Olaf, in Sund in his seventy-fifth year, wills a cross and his own name for his stone and leaves his estate to the Vaim Prayerhouse, where Elias went for company. Vaim is a better novel about men alone than about the woman they spend it explaining, and in its arrangement of who outlasts whom, a good one.