Vaim Hotel

by Jon Fosse

The Guest arrives at the empty Vaim Hotel, owned by the commanding and blunt Brita. She seems to recognise him, though he has no memory of her. He checks in with his two suitcases and leather shoulder bag; he hasn't yet decided how long to stay and can't remember exactly what he's brought with him. The next day The Guest explores Vaim, meeting a shopkeeper and a sailor. He dines at the local restaurant, also owned by Brita, and begins to realise his possessions are going missing. Over the course of his stay his belongings, and sense of self, are repeatedly displaced, until eventually he finds himself bound to the town and unable to escape, caught in a loop of debt and servitude to Brita. The second instalment in Jon Fosse's Vaim Trilogy is a discomfiting and propulsive mystery, marking a new departure from the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature-laureate. 

136 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication September 1, 2026

About the author

Jon Olav Fosse was born in Haugesund, Norway and currently lives in Bergen. He debuted in 1983 with the novel Raudt, svart (Red, black). His first play, Og aldri skal vi skiljast, was performed and published in 1994. Jon Fosse has written novels, short stories, poetry, children's books, essays and plays. His works have been translated into more than forty languages. He is widely considered as one of the world's greatest contemporary playwrights. Fosse was made a chevalier of the Ordre national du Mérite of France in 2007. Fosse also has been ranked number 83 on the list of the Top 100 living geniuses by The Daily Telegraph.

He was awarded The Nobel Prize in Literature 2023 "for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable".

Since 2011, Fosse has been granted the Grotten, an honorary residence owned by the Norwegian state and located on the premises of the Royal Palace in the city centre of Oslo. The Grotten is given as a permanent residence to a person specifically bestowed this honour by the King of Norway for their contributions to Norwegian arts and culture.

Reviews

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

yes I'd bought a sausage in a bun on the ferry across the Sygne Fjord, with diced raw onions, and ketchup and mustard of course, but that was the only thing I'd eaten and now it was already late, it was almost nighttime, it was getting dark, and this restaurant Brita told me about, yes, I'd noticed it myself too, and that shop, called The Vaim General Store, across from The Vaim Hotel, was probably closed now, and then there was the parking lot between The General Store and The Vaim Hotel, and below that was The Quay, and then there were a few boathouses along the shore and some houses scattered around what must have be the Vaim town center, and I'd also caught a glimpse of a white church tower, so Vaim probably also had a church with a cemetery around it, and I'd noticed some scattered farms along the road too, yes, and driven past the occasional isolated house, so that's what Vaim's like, I thought,

Vaim Hotel (2026) translated by Damion Searls from Nobel laureate Jon Fosse's Vaim Hotell (2026) is the second in a loose trilogy of Vaim novels, after the 2025 Vaim - my review.

The three can be read standalone, unlike the volumes of the Septology, but share a common setting in the eponymous ficticious small town, north of Björgvin, on the West Norwegian coast in the Sygne Fjord, Fosse having taken the name from a local nickname for the real-life Vadheim, as Fosse has said (ChatGPT translation) 'with a shop, a hotel, a small newspaper office, a quay, and a café'.

The trilogy is, as Fosse has acknowledged in a 2025 interview in Samlaget, a rather lighter and less ambitious work than Septology, a form of reaction to both that work and the subsequent Nobel Prize (which had clearly been on Fosse's mind for two decades) - and Vaim Hotel dials up the humour, although Fosse has said is not something he deliberately aims for:

"I'd rather keep away from humour, but I hope that now and then I succeed in writing something unintentionally funny. It has to be genuine, honest, entirely sincere. Once you start aiming for humour, it becomes something else. Humour is artificial, something forced into being. I can see comedy in Vaim, but I think there's been comedy in everything I've written for many years. I'm a tragicomic writer — at least that's how it seems to me, though I understand very little, especially about myself."
(ChatGPT translation of the same interview

The novel is primarily narrated by an unnamed man, referred to later in Vaim as 'The Guest', who, for reasons he doesn't entirely know, buys a second-hand station wagon, packs his bags, and sets out on a drive letting 'the road take me wherever it wanted to take me'. After driving a few hours, follows a sign to Vaim, a name that rings a bell, although he doesn't think he's been there.

There he discovers the Vaim General Store (the only one of the buildings Fosse mentions to feature in the first novel), the Vaim Restaurant and the Vaim Hotel.

The Hotel's proprietor, who introduces herself as Brita, seems to somehow either be expecting him or recognise him - 'No, if it isn't him, she said' - something that, disconcertingly, happens with others he meets in Vaim. He wonders if it's possible that it's from the time his picture appeared in the newspapers - an incident a long time ago, but which still impacts his life, and on which he doesn't want to dwell (nor explain to the reader).

He is the hotel's sole guest, although he assured the hotel gets busier in the summer, and Brita generally is a rather odd host, for example happily letting herself into his room while he explores the small town to examine his belongings, as well as shamelessly putting him to work on maintanence tasks. She also proves to be the (equally odd) proprietor of the Vaim Restaurant.

His next encounter (after the crowd, that as in Vaim, tend to hang around on The Quay) is with The Shopkeeper, proprietor of the Vaim General Store who, despite it being past closing hours, proceeds to show off his comprehensive inventory:

and I saw that we were now entering a part of the shop where there really was everything, batteries, light bulbs, fishing rods, sinkers, mooring buoys, nets, clogs, sneakers, dress shoes, mousetraps, rat traps, mouse poison, winter coats, pants, raincoats, knitting yarn, knitting needles, pots, frying pans, nails, screws, padlocks, gas cans, toy cars, dolls, teddy bears, jump ropes, colored pencils, coloring books, board games, decks of cards, hats, caps, scarves, writing paper, envelopes, ballpoint pens, umbrellas, pencils, chains in various sizes, rope in various sizes and colors, flags, Christmas decorations, Norwegian flags, paint, paintbrushes, all kinds of batteries, all kinds of light bulbs, hammers, an axe, a sledgehammer, shovels, rakes, a pitchfork, and I don't know what else

Yes, the people in this town can buy everything they need right here, The Shopkeeper said
It's a long way to the nearest city, he said
It's important that we carry everything the people of Vaim might need, he said

the reader can't help but think that, and unlike its equivalent in Sund, everything except a needle and black thread, else Jatgeir wouldn't have needed to go to Bjørgvin to buy some, triggering the events relayed in Vaim!

But just as Jatgeir got rather swindled in both the big city and the Sund Grocery Store, the proprietor of the Vaim General Store and the Vaim Hotel/Restaurant prove to have a racket going themselves (as per this extract in Granta) - without a little cooperation between the two of us neither of us would have managed, and if it's of a somewhat dubious kind, yes, well, any hotel and shop in Vaim would have to be somewhat dubious, thinks Brita later on.

And the third main character he meets, the only one to at least try to act as some form of ally, is The Sailor, not actually from Vaim but rather from a small island travelling to Vaim by his boat. A boat that proves to be the motorboat 'Eline' from the novel Vaim, owned first by Jatgeir, then later by Olaf (aka Frank), and which Olaf sold to the Sailor, as Olaf told us in Vaim (see quote in my review) and The Sailor relays to The Guest here:

would you believe it, a Strilelander from Sartor turned up here with a sjark, it was probably because of a woman, her name was Eline, yes, one night when we were sitting and drinking a little he offered to sell me his other boat for a reasonable price, yes, since he already had a sjark he would sell me the other boat for a reasonable price, is what he said, he really just wanted to get rid of it, so I got the boat practically for free, The Sailor said and then he says that the man who'd sold him the boat went back to Sartor in his sjark and he says that he'd never been luckier, never gotten a better deal in his life

The narrator gets increasingly intimidated and bewildered by Brita and The Storekeeper, and effectively trapped in Vaim, first misplacing his wallet, then the keys to his station wagon. And is also convinced he can see a woman (potentially one from his past, relating to the incident covered in the newspapers) through the windows of the apparently abandoned house opposite his room.

And a brief coda narrated by Brita has her explaining The Guest's ultimate fate - almost a ghost story - as well as, amusingly, her own travels outside of Vaim to nearby Sygne, which seem primarily a vehicle for her to complain to other hotel owners as her guests do to her, and to reassure herself that her meatballs and fish cakes do remain unmatched.

Brilliantly done - only 4 stars because this is no Septology (but that was a 6, or even 7 star read). And I look forward to Vaim Vekeblad (Vaim Weekly), the third installment, which Brita makes available in her hotel lounge:

I subscribe to The Vaim Weekly, it came three days a week for a while but now it's only once a week like before, she says
and she says that if I want then of course I should just have a seat and read the papers, there's not much in The Vaim Weekly anymore, it's almost all obituaries now
[...]
I had no interest in reading The Bjørgvin Times because back then, yes, that time, that was one of the newspapers among others that printed a picture of me, yes, not just one but several pictures, and that had given me a lasting dislike for that paper, yes, strong enough that, yes, so strong that I didn't even want to pick up a copy of that paper, and I hadn't, not once in all these years, so I wasn't going to have anything to do with that copy of The Bjørgvin Times, but The Vaim Weekly might be interesting to read, since I'd never read that paper before, I thought,

Thanks to Transit Books via Edelweiss for the ARC.

[Doug · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks to Edelweiss and Transit books for the pre-publication ARC.

I read and liked the first volume in this loose trilogy when it came out a year back, and was intending to reread that prior to this, but I remembered enough of it, and discovered they COULD be read as standalones, so just read the last 10% of Vaim before embarking on this episode. Like that first installment, this takes place in the rather strange, hypnotic small titular Nordic town, and the first 90% is told from the POV of a man who we come to know only as The Guest.

We learn he has come to the town rather spur-of-the-moment, in a newly purchased car, and it seems he is escaping from something in his past that had landed his name and picture in the papers - but the details are left tantalizingly vague. Like Jatgeir in the first book, he feels somewhat out of place, and the three townspeople he encounters all seem to be playing games with him. The final 10% is then taken over by Brita, the taciturn and somewhat sinister hotelier, who recounts what eventually became of The Guest, and what transpires after his departure.

This is all told in Fosse's usual style of run-on sentences, sans normal punctuation - which usually I abhor - but here it really does propel you through the book - this can (and probably SHOULD) be read in a single sitting of 2 or 3 hours. Will be curious if the final volume ties up all the threads, but suspect it will leave as many unanswered questions as the first two volumes.

[Ruben · Rating 4 out of 5]

A man shows up in Vaim in his brown station wagon and his two suitcases. He is somewhat out of sorts, not entirely sure what he has come to do in Vaim or why he is checking in to the Vaim Hotel. The hotel owner Brita seems to recognise him, but from where? From the time when his photo was in the newspaper? And why is she so nosy?

As with all Fosse books I read, nothing much happens, but it is the mysterious atmosphere that makes it special. The big, empty hotel has something eerie, even more so when it seems our tragic guest is being cheated and possibly unable to leave.

I would recommend reading Vaim first, even though Fosse himself has said this is not a trilogy that must be read in order. It is nice to recognise some references to Vaim and some people coming back.

Thanks to Edelweiss and Transit Books for the ARC

[Lydia Tadross Marks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really this should be read in one sitting.
Advance copy from fitzcarraldo!