Vaim

‘For all the roaming metaphysics and magnificently recursive, hypnagogic rhythms of this one-sentence novel, it’s those passages grounded in the everyday that pop – scenes featuring meatballs and rice pudding, comparisons between American and European suitcases, Jatgeir admitting that for much of his life he had felt closer to boats than to any woman…. How can prose that is so simple – cushions are “nice”, work is “trusty” – 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.’
— Sukhdev Sandhu, Guardian

‘It’s this enmeshment of characters, narratives, novels and landscapes that feeds the aggregate pleasures of reading Fosse. In its service here again – and wonderfully wrought by translator Damion Searls – Fosse’s prose continues to cunningly prioritize a plain, unliterary vocabulary. But this unfolds into a mobile, reactive, single-sentence structure that recedes and builds, in concert with his character’s many reiterations, until its rhythmic, poetical lure becomes irresistible to any reader with half an ear to hear…. Fosse’s is an intrepid, seductive, highly accomplished writing that perfectly fits to the intricate human truths he seeks to convey.’
— Eimear McBride, Observer

‘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

‘Vaim is about absurd, life-changing volte-faces as well as life’s calm sameness…. Each sentence constitutes a voice as well as disparate reflections merely held together by commas, and punctuated by obligatory yeses. Jatgeir’s, Elias’s and Frank’s voices sound the same. Yet since the purpose of the sentences is not to convey voice, as in a dramatic monologue, but contain shifts in thought, mood and occurrence, the matter of sameness becomes irrelevant. Instead, we’re entangled in knots of syntax and time, in the utterly riveting banalities that preoccupy people…. The novel’s three movements, beautifully composed, are pattern-like rather than progressive in their exploration of the intersections between lives.’
— Amit Chaudhuri, New Statesman

‘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