If the three novels that make up Jon Fosse’s magnum opus Septology arrived like a tsunami of language – sometimes virtuosic and profound, sometimes bathetic, even banal – his latest projected trilogy, again translated by Damion Searls, beginning with Vaim (2025), and now Vaim Hotel, is reassuringly tighter, shorter and more persuasive. The tropes that made the longer work so beguiling and frustrating (male loneliness, fugue states, alcohol dependence, wrestles with God) are all here again, though this time the Norwegian Nobel laureate ensures he takes his readers with him rather than leaving them behind, drowning in a dark fjord of sophomore mysticism.
The novel begins with an unnamed, middle-aged male narrator arriving at a half-empty hotel in a bleak coastal town. ‘Why exactly I came to Vaim and checked into the Vaim Hotel, no, I don’t know.’ The elevator-free dump, with its door numbers ‘so brown that they looked like they were made of copper’, is run by the mysterious and forbidding Brita, who also manages the local restaurant. Her unsettling and intrusive presence contains a note of unintentional comedy when she suddenly appears in the narrator’s room, like a Nordic Basil Fawlty, demanding to know why he’s locked the door.
While the dialogues with Brita induce anxiety, the narrator’s pedantic, Pooterish interiority, with its endless observations and qualifications familiar from Fosse’s previous fiction, exerts a contrapuntal tension. Nothing really happens, but somehow the workings of chance and destiny are being decided over Brita’s excellent meatballs in the restaurant. One of the pleasures of these books is the recurring characters. Here, the lovelorn hero of Vaim, with his boat named Eline, returns as the Sailor. Indeed, there’s a sense of eternal recurrence in Fosse’s novels, one that suggests we are doomed to relive our lives in all their intensity and boredom for eternity.
When the narrator’s possessions start to go missing from his room, beginning with his toiletries and finally his wallet, he becomes convinced that Brita is the thief. She appears to symbolise the avariciousness of the world, or its spiritual bankruptcy, robbing us blind while pretending to offer hospitality. Yet, in the last ten pages of the novel, the point of view abruptly switches (a device used to great effect in Vaim) to Brita, with the narrator simply referred to as the Guest, a man forced to stay at the hotel forever because he has lost his wallet. After investing in the narrator and his consciousness, the effect is to show how all of us must appear starkly unknowable from the outside.
Vaim Hotel is on the one hand a fable of coercion and control, on the other, an existential thriller, full of inexplicable occurrences with a quietly chilling ending.
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