Jon Fosse, Vaim
Transit Books / Fitzcarraldo, 2025
Fosse’s first new novel since winning the Nobel Prize, the first in a series of three books set in the fictional small town of Vaim.
A Best Book of the Year: New Yorker, Financial Times, Publisher’s Weekly
★ Starred Review
“A spectacular story of loneliness, love, and death… It would ruin this endlessly magical and surprising novel to summarize what happens… [One character] sums it all up with understated humor when he considers having his epitaph read, ‘all was strange’… Indelible turns of phrase… Unforgettable.” — Publisher’s Weekly
A Best Book of the Year
“As with everything Fosse writes, there is a surface simplicity with deep reserves of meaning beneath.” — British GQ
“A strange miracle… 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?” — The Guardian
“Wonderfully wrought by translator Damion Searls, Fosse’s prose continues to cunningly prioritise a plain, unliterary vocabulary. But this unfolds … 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… In Vaim, however, it’s deployed to more comic effect than previously, adding an unexpected warmth. Without compromising the sting of existential confusion his characters suffer, Fosse has given the novel a tint of black humour that has more in common with Gogol than Hamsun or Ibsen.”
— Eimear McBride, The Observer
“Whereas Septology was profound and meditative, Vaim is more mysterious and playful. The translation by Damion Searls is, as ever, excellently judged in its rhythms and tones.” — Rónán Hession, The Irish Times
“Through Damion Searls’s deft translation, Fosse’s signature style returns: a single, unbroken current of thought… Vaim is a breathless line of prose that resists the conventions of contemporary fiction in which a character’s wants and desires neatly propel the hero, or antihero, along a familiar, predictable arc.” — Bomb
“Mesmerising, unexpectedly funny, rather creepy. Excellent work!”
— Bookmunch
Publisher / UK Publisher / Amazon / Bookshop.org
Also by Jon Fosse:
Septology
A Shining
Melancholy I-II
Aliss at the Fire
Morning and Evening
Scenes from a Childhood (stories)
A Silent Language (the Nobel Prize lecture)
How It Was (play)