Vaim Hotel

Vaim #2

by Jon Fosse, Damion Searls, Unknown Author

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.

Genres: Fiction, Nobel Prize, Literary Fiction, Novels, Audiobook, Scandinavian Literature, Literature

Paperback

First published 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

[Helga Martiros · Rating 5 out of 5]

Either there’s a ghost here, or else it’s a child’s prank, Brita says
But the thing is that there aren’t any children who live near here, she says

Talk about existential mindfvck!
Talk about disorienting and surreal and irritating!
This book infuriated me! This book scrambled my brain!

When I saw the ‘I’ at the beginning of the book, I thought, good, there are actual chapters and breaks, yes, but, no, after reading pages and pages of nonstop sentences sans full-stop, yes, I realized the book is made up of only two chapters, yes, Chapter I taking up 97.87% of the book, and yes, the remaining few pages belonging to Chapter II, and that’s it, I thought and the first chapter is narrated by ‘The Guest’ who arrives in town and decides to spend the night at the Vaim Hotel, yes, and chapter II is narrated by Brita, the hotel owner, yes, and Mr. Fosse knows how to turn a commonplace act such as getting a room in a hotel to an extraordinarily uncanny event, yes, and I tend to write my reviews of Mr. Fosse’s books in his unique style, yes, because after reading his prose I can’t write any other way, yes, because my head is filled with his tone, voice and diction, yes, and that’s why my review is so messy and incomprehensible, I think, yes, and Vaim Hotel is the second book in the Vaim trilogy, and, I must say, keep them coming Mr. Fosse, yes, I think, keep them coming, yes

Here’s an excerpt:

"I stood there and looked at the curtains and I thought what am I doing here really, here in Vaim, here in this hotel, I thought, but, but I probably had just as much reason to be here as I had to be anywhere else, so I could be here just as well as anywhere, I thought, if it wasn’t any better to be here than anywhere else well then it wasn’t any worse either, I should think, I thought, yes, and now to see a little of this great view, I thought and I yanked the curtains open and the second I looked outside it seemed like I was looking at a face, yes, it was like there was a face outside the window, with eyes, looking at me, and judging from the hair, and from the shining eyes staring straight at me, yes, it had to be her, but wasn’t she ever going to leave me alone then, didn’t I deserve to be left in peace already, I thought and I looked down, but somehow I still felt her eyes on me, and then I looked up, and then the face was gone, thank goodness, I thought, now that was strange, but it was probably just something I imagined, I thought..."

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Welcome to the Hotel California. . . you can check in, but you can never leave”--The Eagles

The Vaim Hotel (2026) by Nobel Prize--winner Jon Fosse is the second in the Vaim Trilogy. Vain is a fictional Norwegian seaside town occupied by the Vain Hotel, The Vaim Restaurant, the Vaim General Store, the Vaim Church, and so on. This trilogy is lighter fare than Septology, and weirder. If I had to place it in a genre I would call it (what others call it, so I didn’t make this up), mystical realism, as opposed to magical realism, as it leans to the spiritual/paranormal. A man, only identified as The Guest, shows up in a run-down hotel and takes a room from Brita, the Hotel Owner and Manager and head cook of the Restaurant (and only worker in these two establishments). He has two heavy suitcases, but doesn’t have a plan for his holiday, though he has a lot of books and a notebook.

The relevant translation into English for Vaim from the Norwegian is is useless, or unsuccessful. The Guest is the only one that seems to have come to the hotel in a long time, the only one in this story!

Besides the hotel owner and the owner of the General Store, there’s A Sailor who has a boat christened Eline, who happens to be a character in Vaim #1, a woman who is central to three different stories. The Guest connects a little with The Sailor, and they plan a boat trip together that figures in the ending. There just may be a mysterious woman that the Guest sees in an abandoned house. Could this be Eline? No one admits she lives in town. No one else admits seeing her.

Almost nothing happens in the story, except somebody may be getting into The Guest's possessions, a key few go missing, such as his wallet and car keys, keeping him from leaving the Vaim Hotel. The tone might be described as tragic-comic, absurd, though it also feels a bit like a myth or allegory. Does that man come here to die? Is this an allegory about death? Lots of room for interpretation. Plenty of hotel stories to reference in literature feed into it. The ending makes it look like a bit of a shaggy dog story, or cyclical myth.

It’s kind of a ghost story, but I am not sure who all the ghosts are. Vaim is like a ghost town.Eline haunts all these men in the story from the first volume through now. So is she also a kind of femme fatale? We know more about the men than her; she creates reactions in them.Where is she in this book? Is she living in the abandoned house!? The Guest takes with him a framed photograph of his ex; is she here? You get to choose. I guess you could say this is a Halloween story, light horror, since it is eerie or uncanny. I think a lot of people might hate it, seeing it as boring. But it’s a story shaped by literary effects that play on our emotions.

[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.

[Rachel Louise Atkin · Rating 4.5 out of 5]

4.5 stars. Mr Fosse this was spectacular in every way. The shortest and most eerie tale like something from the Twilight Zone. Cannot wait for the third book.

[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

[Rachel · Rating 4.5 out of 5]

The second installment in Fosse's Vaim trilogy and I found this one even more enjoyable than the first.

In Fosse's signature rhythmic and circular prose, we are introduced to a man who has found himself arriving at the Vaim Hotel under rather unknown circumstances. We aren't privy to much of his background, beyond the fact that he was featured in the newspaper for one reason or another years ago and this feature seems to make him rather recognizable to those he encounters. After arriving at the hotel, he has a series of strange and confounding encounters with Brita, the woman who runs the hotel and hotel restaurant, as well as with the general store owner and a sailor whose boat, "Eline", connects this story back to the first in the series.

While reading this, I kept thinking about the number of unimpressive horror novels I've read lately and how even though these novels were much more explicit in their attempts to manufacture shock and horror or craft a spooky atmosphere, none of them chilled me in the way this novel did. Brita's overbearing presence, everybody's inability to understand social cues and norms, and the general atmosphere of unease made me squirm more than child hungry forests (What the Forest Devours) or vampiric woman (Mothersucker) have.

Filled with existential dread and an uncertainty that permeates every thought and interaction, this ended up being quite the satisfying read.

[Gigi · Rating 4.5 out of 5]

“Hei Lløyd. Little sløw tønight, isn’t it? Hæhæhæhæ”

[Curtis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hell yea, my ninja John Fossee came through with a banger! This book feels like being trapped inside Tony Soprano's coma dreams, or one of those Ramsey Campbell stories where you check into a haunted hotel without realizing you're already one of the ghosts. I've been seeing lots of negative reviews for it, but it was right up this reader’s alley.

[Ann Myhre · Rating 4 out of 5]

Boka er andre delen av Vaim-serien, og inneholder noen av de samme karakteren fra den første boka.

Den navnløse hovedkarakteren, ankommer bygda Vaim i en brun bil. Han forteller at bygda ligger ved Vaimfjorden, en liten sidetarm til Sygndefjorden. Han har bestemt seg for å overnatte på stedets hotell, der han er den eneste gjesten, og bokas første del handler om det første døgnet hans der. Han møter Brita, hun som eier hotellet, handelsmannen, den andre som driver næringsvirksomhet i bygda, og Sjømannen, som kjøpte en båt fra en av de tidligere karakteren i forrige bok. Det dukker også opp et spøkelse.
Andre delen er det Brita som forteller.

Første boka i serien var en stor leseopplevelse for meg, humoren, absurditetene, de rare menneskene. Denne boka er annerledes, men helt typisk Fosse. Boka legger mye mer vekt på alt som er norsk, og vestlandsk, og det slår meg flere ganger at oversetterene skal få store problemer. Jeg lurer på om Fosse legger til ord og uttrykk som er helt umulig å oversette, jeg? Fenalår og spekekjøtt for eksempel, hvordan skiller man det på engelsk?
Boka føles nesten som en turistguide til det urnorske, til det spesielle vestlandske, til det som må være helt umulig for andre enn vestlendinger å forstå. Bare dette med det spesielle forholdet vi - nordmenn - har til hverandre når vi bor på bygda.
Og jeg tror også, hvis jeg kjenner min Fosse, at han har et vanskelig forhold til folk som kjent.

Boka er ikke like morsom som Vaim, men det fins nok av ting å le av i denne boka også.

Jeg lånte boka via BokBites, og når tredje bok etter hvert kommer ut, neste år, vil jeg kjøpe alle tre i fysiske bøker å ha og lese.

[Bhavna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vaim Hotel, like Vaim, also follows the triptych structure though subtly

A protagonist called 'The Guest' interacts with Brita; the Hotel Owner, a merchant who tricks 'the guest' into buying things & a sailor who is validating the paranoia of the guest

The Guest seems to be losing his everyday things - fishing rod, car keys, wallet eventually making him face debts

By the end the protagonist get structurally imprisoned in the town

[victoria marie]

yes,

been thinking on this, & it was stronger than Vaim—again also working well as an audiobook—but I’m not that excited for the third… somewhat over it.

I’ll read the last one when the translation comes out, but only as a bit of a completist… I think.

[Ole Ones · Rating 2.5 out of 5]

Jeg blir fenget av det rytmiske Fosse-språket, men synes ellers at dette var ganske uinteressant.

[Jonas Mikal]

Eg likte han. Eg har hatt eit inntrykk av at folk ikkje har gjort det, men eg trur mykje av det har med kva dei les det opp mot. Fosse er naturlegvis blitt enigmatisk etter nobelprisen, som gjer at folk går inn med høge forventingar. Det har nok òg med at dei les det opp mot moderne klassikarar som Septologien og Trilogien. Men skal ein lese kvar roman med forventing om at han skal vere like bra som dei to sett du nok deg sjølv opp for å bli skuffa.

Men, men, som sagt så likte eg han. Klassisk Fosse med sine gode særpreg. Koste meg.

[Amanda Skogjordet · Rating 4.5 out of 5]

Jeg føler meg gaslighta

[Marius Emanuelsen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Jon Fosses ambisiøse versjon/samskriving av tre litterære klassikere: Tassen på fisketur, Tassen bor på hotell og, sist, men ikke minst, Tassen møter en tyv.

[Therese Skailand · Rating 5 out of 5]

Elsker boka, men kommer ikke til å sjekke inn på Vaim hotell!

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

I believe this is my sixth Fosse.

The second in a trilogy. Loosely connected to the first book.
Same city. Sprinkles of pieces from the last.

Classic Fosse. That sounds so silly but if you have read enough Fosse, you get it.

A visitor checking into Hotel Vaim. Exploring his time there.
Meeting a few people. That's the story.

But a flicker of what once was remains in a house.
Contemplation.

And then we get the last few pages to spin it on its head.

What gets left behind? How do we remember? What will repeat? Who is escaping what?

My head is still spinning around how it all works and what this book just did. I feel like I just thought of new things just writing this.

Anyways, step into Vaim and Vaim Hotel.

Out October 6th from @transitbooks

Thank you for the advanced copy. I definitely needed it.

[Pianobikes · Rating 3.5 out of 5]

“La mayoría de la gente se queda una sola noche y se pasa na sola vez por la tienda, dice
Sí, digo
Así que me alegro de volver a verte, dice
Y que necesitas hoy, dice
Nada, alguna cosilla, digo” ~Hotel Vaim de Jon Fosse.

Traducción: Cristina Gómez Baggethum.

Una historia kafkiana de principio a fin con el estilo particular de Jon Fosse. Nos vamos a Vaim –no sé si hay puntos de intersección con el anterior libro titulado Vaim porque no lo he leído aún– y acompañamos a un hombre que llega al pueblo y se aloja en el hotel. Es el único huésped y le van sucediendo cosas extrañas, como la desaparición de sus pertenencias, pero no es lo único raro. La mujer que regenta el hotel tiene también un carácter peculiar, así como algún personaje más. Nuestro protagonista comienza a perder el control de su vida y de sus actos, además de sus cosas.

Podría haber sido ideada por el mismo Kafka y mira que a lo largo de la lectura le he dado vueltas a lo que podía haber estado sucediendo en ese hotel, en esa localidad y a la cabeza de nuestro protagonista; pero con todo no he acertado con el final como tampoco acierto con cada historia que he leído de Kafka.

Por lo demás, el estilo de Jon Fosse, adictivo, sin prisa pero sin pausa. La historia va casi en su totalidad de corrido, sin puntos ni comas y, por supuesto, sin capítulos. Pero es una novela corta que se lee muy bien, con una voz, la del huésped que es quien aporta la visión de la historia. Extraña, rara y para darle a la cabeza mientras lo lees.

[Max Sturm]

Fosse really doesn’t miss. He’s back again with a follow up to Vaim (this one’s the second part of his triptych, final part coming next year I think). We get a lot of similar themes being explored here re: agency, autonomy, acceptance, and some spooky ghosts (?).

Unlike in Vaim, in which we never see perspective of Eline, our female antagonist and the central thrust of action and agency, here we get a little coda from Brita, the owner of the hotel. This move by Fosse really destabilized my understanding of the forces at play here.

Initially I read Brita’s behavior (and her scheming with the Shopkeeper) as a sort of Kafkaesque bureaucratic mechanism that was suffocating The Guest’s agency. Through the first section, this was contrasted with a second-guessing that maybe it isn’t a scheme, but actually Vaim is haunted by tricky little ghosts. Placing us within Brita’s perspective to close the novel strengthens the latter reading, but also introduces a more nuanced understanding of agency in general (as does the final reveal of the novel’s cyclical nature). Perhaps it isn’t only external human forces that contribute to our ability (or inability) to act as we would like. 

How do we find a balance between acceptance and passivity?

(Note: Reading this one on vacation in Bergen in October was very nice)

[Judith Rodriguez · Rating 4.25 out of 5]

Me he leído el libro del tirón. Creo que hay que entrar en él sabiendo lo mínimo posible. He visto que hay gente a la que le ha costado entrar por la forma en la que está escrito (de la que prefiero tampoco decir nada), pero a mí me ha encantado. Creo que es precisamente gracias a eso por lo que es tan adictivo y no podía soltarlo.

Hotel Vaim es de esos libros que te tienen en ascuas todo el rato y, cuando llegas a las últimas 10 páginas, no te crees lo que estás leyendo y necesitas media hora después de terminarlo para procesar qué acaba de pasar.

[Patrick · Rating 3.75 out of 5]

¿Será esta la primera obra de Fosse con insinuaciones abiertamente sobrenaturales, aunque ambiguas? En otros trabajos suyos el tiempo cronológico se difumina, pasado-presente-futuro se yuxtaponen; pero aunque conviven dentro de una misma lógica espacial e incluso se observan, continuan siendo parte de una historia ya escrita e inmutable, donde el tratamiento del tiempo funciona como asidero emocional y de reflexión íntima. En Hotel Vaim eso cambia y, como dice la sinopsis del libro, «las certezas y las reglas de la realidad desaparecen, marcando un nuevo rumbo».

[Ian, etc. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m a bad fit for winter. The sun drops and my mind also, and it feels a dream, a door to dusty death. I feel my eyes water and the dream split, and the world is not the world I know, and there are things I forget, things I love. There are things I forget and loves I can’t remember and my eyes don’t see so well at night. Fosse knows winter, knows how to face a headlight in the dark. His stories lap at the shore of memory, take some traveling into the long winter night. Laughing hypnotic. Sparing to devastation. Cold cloud breath in your palms.

[Sjur Selsvik · Rating 3 out of 5]

Likte denne noe mindre enn forrige i serien, men fortsatt god lesning. Framskrivingen av den stusselige mannen byr også her på noen artige situasjoner, men Vaim Hotell er langt mindre av en komedie enn Vaim var. Her er det heller mer av en horror-inspirert variant. Det bygges opp en nifs og underlig stemning, men ikke så veldig mye mer enn det. Enkeltpartier står seg veldig godt, eksempelvis de første beskrivelsene av hotellet og hotellrommet, samt praten med sjømannen. Men som helhet får jeg ikke så mye ut av den.

[ReemK10 (Paper Pills) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loving Jon Fosse!

My reel:

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DecVnr...

[Ole G. · Rating 3.25 out of 5]

Blanding av Groundhog Day og The Shining i bokform. Den milde versjonen

[Alex O'Connor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I always love Fosse. Stylistically, challenging to get behind at first, but once that happened (years ago now) I find a tremendous amount of comfort in the rhythm of his language.

Plot wise, this was a challenging read - vaguely supernatural, and thematically dense in its dealing with the degradation of a high trust society by evil individuals. I found it to be quite tragic, despite the small scale. The injustice of Brita and the entire town towards a lost man was... distressing to say the least? I found myself feeling a lot of righteous indignation! horrible to see a trusting individual slowly be enslaved by an oppressive structure from which there is no escape...

Then of course, the epilogue sort of blows a hole in this perspective, but I do think the thematic weight holds nonetheless.

I also liked the nods towards the first book, and look forward to reading Vaim Daily and seeing if there are any similar nods. I was thrilled when I saw mention of a particularly beautiful boat called the Eline...

In all, another great read from Fosse, but I am glad I reread the first book earlier this month before I dove in.

[Henrik Knudsen · Rating 3.75 out of 5]

Underholdt. Noir-vibber, skråblikk på utkant-Norge, et snev Mysterier og litt Prosessen.

[GONZA · Rating 2.25 out of 5]

I’m sure it’s my fault, and I can’t appreciate this Nobel Prize in Literature because I’m not smart or well-read enough to do so, but I thought I’d left the theater of the absurd behind me back in my senior year of high school, when I was forced to study Beckett and Pinter—and yet…
Setting the plot aside, I also had quite a bit of trouble with the author’s writing style—which I won’t spoil for you—and in the end, I’ve read this Nobel Prize too, and I won’t be doing it again.

Sono sicura che é colpa mia e non riesco ad apprezzare questo nobel per la letteratura perché non sono abbastanza intelligente e acculturata per farlo, ma credevo di essermi lasciata le commedie dell'assurdo alle spalle ai tempi del quinto superiore, quando sono stata costretta a studiare Beckett e Pinter, e invece....
Tralasciando la trama, ho avuto anche le mie belle difficoltá con il modo di scrivere dell'autore che non vi spoilero e alla fine, anche questo permio Nobel l'ho letto e non lo rifaró.

I received from the Publisher a complimentary digital advanced review copy of the book in exchange for a honest review.

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

The plot of Vaim Hotel is simple: A man checks into a hotel, works there for a year, then falls into the ocean from a fishing boat, body never recovered. Questions of who he was, why he was there, what he hoped to accomplish are never answered and may be beside the point.

As with many of Fosse’s other novels, the unnamed narrator (aka The Guest) is psychologically unstable, varying in his narration from lucidity to utter uncertainty. Unlike other novels by Fosse—such as Melancholy I and Melancholy II about Norwegian painter Lars Hertervig, who suffered from hallucinations and other psychological problems—the psychological state of Vaim’s narrator is less extreme. But, like Fosse’s more recent A Shining, Vaim Hotel is both more implicitly spiritual than his earlier works and ambiguous about the nature of that spirituality.

The story begins when the Guest—the nameless narrator, a man at loose ends—checks into a hotel during the off-season in a small town called Vaim located along a fjord. His interior monologue is presented as an unbroken string of comma splices, with line divisions provided only for the dialogue he reports. His story ends with a single full stop. The last few pages are given over to Brita’s terse account of his stay and disappearance.

As the Guest walks to the Vaim Hotel, a few people greet him to say that he looks familiar to them, but they can’t recall from where. He too thinks of an unspecified time in his past when he was in the news—for reasons that feel withheld from the reader—but he assumes it was so long ago and in a different part of the country that nobody would likely remember anymore.

The Guest has no reason for choosing Vaim as his destination, and he tells us that just the day before he left for Vaim he bought the used car he drives into town (and eventually loses the keys to along with his wallet). He arrives with only two suitcases—the only items he’s kept from his former life, whatever that was. Apart from clothes, he’s also brought photographs of his ex-wife, still in their frames. When he looks out his hotel window, he thinks—he’s unsure—he sees a woman on the second floor of the dilapidated house across the street looking directly at him—a woman who reminds him of somebody he’d rather forget, for reasons he never reflects on but instead quickly turns his thoughts away from.

During his stay, the Guest interacts with Brita (the Hotel Owner), the Vaim General Store owner (the Shopkeeper), and a garrulous drunken fisherman at the Vaim Restaurant, identified only as the Sailor. Brita is brash and rude but ultimately friendly in her imposing way. The Shopkeeper is helpful but insistent, short of demanding, that the Guest make certain purchases while in town (including a fishing kit whose ownership Brita will contest). Between the two, their very desire to help seems itself an act of hostility. Many of the Guest’s exchanges with Brita and the Shopkeeper are comically bizarre, but I don’t recall any form of comedy in other work by Fosse I’ve read, so I’m left wondering whether Fosse intends Vaim Hotel to be read as a comedy, at least partly.

Inane situations make for what seems intended as comedy: Brita frequently invades the Guest’s hotel room, with and without his permission, and on one occasion he returns to catch her red-handed, opening and rifling through his suitcases. Conversations end with each character merely staring at the other, neither leaving to end the meeting, each waiting for the other to make the first move. The Shopkeeper charges the Guest for goods the Shopkeeper is sure the Guest will need and use, the Guest’s consent assumed and with good cheer.

If Fosse is trying to break new ground, then Vaim Hotel doesn’t quite succeed. Tensions created during bizarre interactions never resolve themselves; instead, they are sustained by a weird anxiety that makes the Guest—and his readers—uncomfortable. But the narrative is already so ambiguous that the comedy further knots rather than untangles its uncertainties: The Guest often tells us that he himself is unsure of whether the actions of others he reports are inappropriate or whether his mood makes him exaggerate. Pushy as Brita is, we occasionally have reason to see matters from her side.

The Guest describes his stay at the hotel in the past tense. Whether he relates his account to us at the end of the stay, before his disappearance, or if he gives it after his disappearance remains ambiguous, perhaps unknowable.

The novel’s ending suggests that a type of loop is in effect in Vaim, not in the nature of a Twilight Zone episode or a science fiction story of a glitch in time. Instead, Vaim evokes—at least in me—a sense that the town is a purgatorial way station for the spiritually lost. Had the Guest led an aimless, purposeless life? Was his disappearance from the fishing boat the fall of a drunk or the dive of a suicide?

At the end, Brita tells us that the next guest to her hotel looked familiar.

For more of my reviews, please see https://www.thebookbeat.com/backroom/...