Vaim

📝 Description

<div><font face="GH Guardian Headline, Guardian Egyptian Web, Georgia, serif"><span style="font-size:20px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255);">In the Norwegian master’s latest example of ‘mystical realism’, one man makes a dreamlike, hypnotic voyage through life</span></font></div><div><font face="GH Guardian Headline, Guardian Egyptian Web, Georgia, serif"><span style="font-size:20px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255);"><br /></span></font></div><div><font face="GH Guardian Headline, Guardian Egyptian Web, Georgia, serif"><span style="font-size:20px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255);">“Ihave always known that writing can save lives,” said the Norwegian author Jon Fosse in his speech accepting the 2023 Nobel prize in literature. “And if my writing also can help to save the lives of others, nothing would make me happier.” Rare is the novelist who talks in such language these days: fiction tends to know its modest place. Fosse, who is also a poet and an essayist, and one of the most widely performed playwrights in the world, follows his own path. A case in point: Septology (2019-2021), published across three volumes, running to more than 800 pages, containing a single sentence. Forget formalism, though; his fictions, often set in fjordic Norway, are disintegration loops, quiet and incantatory, emotionally overwhelming.</span></font></div><div><font face="GH Guardian Headline, Guardian Egyptian Web, Georgia, serif"><span style="font-size:20px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255);"><br /></span></font></div><div><font face="GH Guardian Headline, Guardian Egyptian Web, Georgia, serif"><span style="font-size:20px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255);">At fewer than 120 pages, Vaim, his first new work since winning the Nobel, is a wisp of a thing. Divided into three sections, each narrated by a different character, it begins with Jatgeir sailing on a small boat from the small town of Vaim to the big city of Bjørgvin (Bergen). His mission is to buy a needle and thread to fix a missing button. It’s a long journey and, not just at one shop but at two, he gets royally ripped off, being charged far over the odds for a single spool. He huffs and seethes, but says nothing to the storekeepers themselves. What a hick, we might think. What a chump.</span></font></div><div><font face="GH Guardian Headline, Guardian Egyptian Web, Georgia, serif"><span style="font-size:20px;background-color:rgb(255,255,255);">Jatgeir, part Prufrock, part sitcom sadsack, lives alone in the house of his dead parents. Its curtains are beige, his hair is greying, occasionally he trims his beard. Far from rich, he is invisible to the women around him. He often finds himself harking back to Eline, the “secret love of my youth”. When he named his boat after her, the locals had giggled and she had moved away. How surprising, then – absurd, even – that on the night of his sewing thread humiliation, he is roused from his sleep by Eline calling his name. She’d like him, she says, to rescue her from he