Boredom

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.

The narrator of Cathy Sweeney’s first novel has finally cracked. I say ‘finally’ because there have been signs: drinking alone; disliking her daughter, or at least her type; having an affair with her friend’s son; opening a separate bank account in her maiden name when her mother died. But in the beginning we don’t know any of this. We don’t know what she’s doing, and neither does she. It’s an ordinary Tuesday in November when she leaves her comfortable home in the suburbs of Dublin, which she shares with her husband and their two almost-adult children: ‘I grab my handbag and keys, let the front door shut behind me. I have no idea that I will never come back.’ What follows is a taut tale of the protagonist’s journey by car, train, bus and ferry.

Natsumi lives in a modern flat in Tokyo with her husband and two young sons, her life comfortable but circumscribed by the tedium of household chores. Washing dishes in the sink, she finds herself transfixed, gazing at the ‘rope of water’ falling from the tap, twisting like a snake: ‘There was something Sisyphean in the nature of the roster of simple domestic tasks... never an end in sight.’ Things are at once too easy and too much for her; the kitchen is so perfect she hesitates to spoil its pristine condition and ends up buying ready-cooked meals, her life shrunk to what seems stifling captivity.   She memorises the layout of the super-market and makes notes: ‘Fish Day specials: tuna or red snapper or yellow-tail or octopus sashimi.