Book Review: Vaim by Jon Fosse

Vaim is a strange novel. It's written all in one sentence. It's a short novel, broken into three parts. Each part is a point-of-view of the one of the characters. The story is slowly uncovered in this way. It feels like a painting coming together slowly as you read details from different perspectives. The prose is simple and has a rhythmic quality.

Note: This review contains spoilers. However, I don't think knowing the plot will spoil this sort of book.

Most of the plot advances through the internal monologue of the characters. The first character, Jatgeir buys a spool of thread and a needle but feels ripped off and won't say anything to the clerk, only for it to happen again. This is recurring bit throughout the story. For instance, the shopkeeper describes the interaction from her side. It is funny because it is oddly relatable, kind of like a Curb or Seinfeld bit.

The novel is about agency and inertia of time. The male characters lack agency and are easily swayed one way or another. The female, Eline, possesses most of the agency. The novel takes place in a small fishing village. The men become fisherman because that's what their father did or those were the only jobs available. The male characters never get around to asking a woman out or finding a wife. When the woman comes into their life, she takes charge. They stay out of convenience, while she enters and exits their lives as she sees fit.

Funnily enough, she never asks one of them his name and simply starts calling him Frank. He never bothers to correct her. The whole village begins to refer to him as such. After she leaves, they go back to his name: Olaf. If you don't take the time to form an identity, you can be shaped and molded. Partly, it doesn't really matter how you see yourself. Part of identity is perception of others. You simple cannot be someone, no matter how earnestly you play the part, if others don't see you that way.

Another key theme is the inertia of time. Part II is about a hermit, Elias. He only leaves the house to see Jatgeir. Eventually, due to Elina's jealously, they stop meeting all together. Time passes and the hermit begins to mentally unravel. Its difficult to discern what's reality and when he is hallucinating. Elais hears knocking several times and checks to see no one there. There's a scene when Jatgeir sees Eline, his long lost love, from his boat for the first time:

"I don't understand anything, now I can't be awake, because this must be a dream, and it's not like it matters much, a dream is a dream and reality is reality, but in a way reality has probably always been, yes, no, no not like a dream, but reality has had something dreamlike about it too probably my whole life, reality is in the dream the way the boat is in the water, I think, or maybe the other way around, the water is the reality and the boat is the dream, because a boat is probably always a dream of something or another, yes, definitely, that's what a boat is for sure and certain, that's what it was for me anyway, I don't know exactly what dream but the boat had always been some kind of dream, ever since I was a little boy"

There are several moments like this throughout the book. It partly seems like maladaptive daydreaming of someone who spend a lot of time alone but also the incredible loneliness of aging by yourself.

The tragedy is that this sort of time blindness and lack of agency is pervasive in the lives of the men. Time passes, they realize they missed out or may have desired a differently life for themselves but are too stuck to change. The woman, Eline, alters the course of their lives with relative ease and they, out of convenience, let that decision snowball until time runs out. But even then they're so settled in their ways. When she enters their lives, she changes it - their behavior, their friends, their house. As she exits, they go back into their ways.

It gets at a certain complacency and comfort This seems like a distinctively male phenomenon in this context. Reminds of John William's Stoner. Lives not defined by grand action or ambition, but by slow accumulation of small, passive acceptances. , which some people tend to overvalue. In this calculation, they see the cost too great - why change something that's going well. Until someone comes along and forces them. It reminds me of The Tartar Steppe, where the protagonist stays in a career as a guard despite wanting different almost the moment he arrives at the fort. By the time he leaves, in his old age, nothing is the same.

It makes me wonder, how many things have I done just out of routine? Do I over-value comfort? Do I allow people to take away agency, in big and small ways?