VAIM

Three residents of a coastal Norwegian town ponder life, love, and what might’ve been.

This slim novel by the Norwegian neomodernist and Nobel Prize winner is a single sentence in three sections, each from a resident in a small fishing community. The first, narrated by a man named Jatgeir, follows him on an errand to acquire a needle and thread, during which he’s interrupted by his longtime secret love, Eline, who asks him to literally ferry her away from her failing marriage. The second section is narrated by Elias, a neighbor of Jatgeir’s and bemused observer, and the third by Frank, the troublesome husband mentioned in the first section. Curiously, Eline doesn’t get an opportunity to narrate her side of things, which intensifies her place as a muse or possession. (Jatgeir has named his boat the Eline while Frank’s boat is named the Elinor. Names are fluid, underscoring the theme of shaky identities.) The story is infused with themes of regret and uncertainty, and the run-on sentence intensifies the feeling, as if each character is trying, only semisuccessfully, to determine what their feelings are. (“No, that’s embarrassing, I think, it’s almost enough to make me turn red, I think, no, how could I ever have come up with the idea of doing that,” Jatgeir muses, in a typically elliptical passage.) Fosse doesn’t put a period at the end of this novel’s long sentence, but the story does reach a resolution. Still, Fosse’s main goal is to generate an atmosphere of closed-off men struggling. (The novel opens with Jatgeir getting gouged while purchasing a needle and thread; Frank recalls needing to be falling-down drunk to introduce himself to Eline.) Typical of Fosse’s fiction, the novel uses a recursive style to convey confusion and listlessness, with occasional meditations on love and faith. No clear answers arrive, but it’s a fine portrait of uncertainty.

Glum subject matter enlivened by Fosse’s graceful, fluid style.