VAIM HOTEL

A stranger arrives in a coastal town where small idiosyncrasies grow increasingly troubling.

This novella by Norwegian Nobelist Fosse is a kind of companion to Vaim (2025), another constrained existential study. Here, the narrator has arrived in town for reasons obscure even to himself. (First line: “Why exactly I came to Vaim and checked into The Vaim Hotel, no, I don’t know.”) The titular hotel is a grand 40-room edifice seemingly out of proportion to demand; the community itself feels barren. (An empty house nearby stands as a symbol for the place’s disoriented, unfinished vibe.) Everywhere he looks, a lack of clarity is part of the atmosphere: When someone says the hotel owner’s husband “went on his way,” the narrator is unsure if he’s talking about an errand, divorce, or death. And while there’s not much to do, what he does gets complicated: He purchases a fishing set but soon falls into a dispute about who owns the set and who bought it. His wallet and car keys vanish, and Brita seems overly comfortable entering the man’s room and rummaging through his things. Stylistically, the novella is quintessential Fosse, defined by run-on sentences rich with switchbacks and qualifications, focused on matters of identity. But this might be Fosse’s most deliberately eerie work, his style serving a disorienting fuzziness suggesting that being out of town puts one’s personality out of place, and a brief coda suggests that the issue is not unique to the narrator. Though not as philosophically rich as Fosse’s Septology, it displays his capacity to use a simple concept to get deep into character.

A sharp meditation on a weird, gloomy trip.