Jon Fosse, the Norwegian novelist who won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature, has sat center stage in the recent revival of interest in Scandinavian literature. Fosse’s one-time creative-writing student Karl Ove Knausgård became the very definition of a publishing sensation when the first volume of his six-part memoir Min Kamp (“My Struggle”) – in which he dragged all his family skeletons out of the closet for all to see – was published in 2009. Danish novelist Solvej Balle’s seven-part On The Calculation of Volume, of which only the first three parts have been published in translation, has caused a similar stir in the past two years. The series recounts the story of a woman jammed inside an endless time-loop, doomed to live the same day forever, like a less jolly Groundhog Day.
The book exemplifies Fosse’s knack of presenting prose expressively stripped back in the manner of Samuel Beckett
Characters lost to time, for reasons never fully explained, have long been a trope of the Scandinavian novel. When Knut Hamsun – considered by many to be Norway’s answer to Franz Kafka – published his novel Hunger in 1890, he told of a character wandering the streets of Oslo seeking sustenance. Fosse picks up the trail by writing novels in which characters lose themselves in wintry forest scenes and at sea, landscapes which devour them. Turning the pages of his latest novel, Vaim, you might assume that his aim was to similarly maroon the reader inside blizzards of disorienting, snow-blinding text. Fosse writes in Nynorsk, the lesser used of Norway’s two official languages, which helps ground his prose in its own peculiar breathing, as sentences constantly rewind to reexamine pertinent phrases or images. Translator Damion Searls remains sensitive to this distinctive rhythmic footfall.
Fosse’s masterwork is usually considered to be his 2022 novel Septology, seven parts divided over three volumes, that unfolds over nearly 700 pages, written in what amounts to a single sentence, punctuated with strategically deployed commas and dashes. In the book a character named Asle, a widowed painter, visits the nearby town of Bjørgvin to see his old friend, also called Asle, who is suffering the final stages of alcoholism.
Is Bjørgvin Asle a vision of Asle the painter, had his life followed a sadder trajectory? We are never certain – and lack of certainty is a Fosse fixation. We learn that painter Asle’s deceased wife was called Ales – the same four letters, with one displaced. Fosse’s novels often concern themselves with doppelgängers: both in the traditional meaning of supernatural hauntings, but also in that of double personalities which in Fosse’s universe exist in the slipstream of each other’s worlds.
Like Septology, Vaim opens in Bjørgvin where a middle-aged man called Jatgeir has docked his motorboat, which is named Eline after his childhood sweetheart. He has come to town from Vaim, the small fishing village where he lives, to buy some essentials, and to escape his otherwise solitary existence. Two things happen: he is taken advantage of in two different shops, where shopkeepers overcharge him for a needle and thread. Then, bedding down for the night in the motorboat Eline, he is awoken by the cries of the other Eline, the woman who has haunted him since he was a teenager, who calls his name and tells him she is desperate to leave her husband and sail home with him.
This novel – or novella – of just over 100 pages plays out in three concise parts, each of which give us a different insight into the story. The first ends with Jatgeir and Eline sailing back to Vaim on the Eline, with Jatgeir clearly unsettled by the responsibility and compromise that will now come with sharing his life and his house.
Eline – both the motorboat and once unrequited love – shows Fosse demonstrating his trademark doppelgänger technique, but it would be too much of a spoiler to outline the particulars of parts two and three, narrated by Jatgeir’s best friend Elias and by Eline’s husband, Frank, respectively. There’s death, and it’s death as only Fosse can write, with supernatural overtones in that Henry James fashion where memory manifests itself as ghostly apparitions in the present. To underline that nothing is certain, in the section told by Frank, we learn that none of the characters are known by their actual names – Eline (real name Josephine) decided to call Frank (real name Olaf) Frank purely on a whim. Jatgeir’s actual name is Geir, to which his friends attached the prefix “jat” because of his tendency to agree to everything – jat meaning “yes” in Nynorsk.
Anyone who has read Fosse previously will recognize these tics. Lonely men sail between isolated villages and larger, forbidding towns. They lose anchor as they wander around city streets, lost in thoughts and in the snow, and as they mourn wives and loved ones taken too soon. For a literature lost in disorientation, the idées fixes that recur between his books become useful markers. Character names, too, repeat across his oeuvre, although not necessarily denoting the same person.
Fosse’s complexities are thus both challenging and delightful, and his prose is never obstuse or needlessly overdone. Nynorsk appeared during the 19th century as a fresh alternative to standard spoken Norwegian, a brand-new language designed to echo ancient dialects that were slipping toward extinction. Vaim exemplifies Fosse’s knack of presenting prose that is expressively stripped back, in the manner of Samuel Beckett, and that could also read as a timeless fairy tale. As his words inch across the page – backtracking on themselves, ruminating on what has already been stated – to lose yourself inside their mesmeric rituals and rhythmic currents becomes the greatest pleasure.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s January 19, 2026 World edition.
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