Vaim

Translated by Damion Searls

French paperback with flaps, 120 pages | Audiobook read by Toby Jones
Published 23 October 2025

So, I said, well here we are, I said and I ran my fingers through my beard, my greying beard, I wasn’t young anymore, no, but I wasn’t an old man either, it would probably be fair to say ageing, yes, an ageing man, neither more nor less, and it was about time I stopped taking these little sprees to Bjørgvin, what was the point anymore, tying up at the quay of The Wharf in Bjørgvin and not using my time there to do anything but sit in a bar or restaurant or café, yes, usually The Fowl, that’s what they call the place, but sometimes I’d go to The Food Hall or The Last Boat, or The Coffeehouse – other than going somewhere like that or just staying in the cabin of my boat there wasn’t really anything to do, or, well, the first day, or first couple of days, there’d be something I needed to buy, yes, always, this or that, there’d be one thing or another that I’d thought might come in handy and I’d written it down on a sheet of paper on my living room table back home, something I couldn’t get at The Vaim General Store but that would come in handy, it was always different, it could be anything, yes, over the years I’d gradually bought everything I really needed but a needle and some black thread to sew a loose button back on, yes, that’s what I needed to buy this year, but actually it was a lot harder than you’d think to buy a single needle and a single spool of black thread in the city of Bjørgvin, Norway’s second biggest city, it was almost unbelievable how hard it was, you’d almost think that the shopkeepers didn’t want to bother selling something as small as a needle and spool of thread, because I’d walked from one clothing shop to the next and none of them had anything like that for sale, no, they said, no, we don’t carry that, and you’d have to say that there was something a little bit mocking in their answer, and in their face behind that answer, and when I asked where I might be able to buy it the answer was always the same, no, we don’t know, sometimes they would add that they don’t sell needle and thread in this shop, only clothes, ready-to-wear clothes as they put it, and now if I wanted to buy myself some new clothes, if I could afford it, and I have to admit that one of them, or maybe more than one of them, was hinting that I needed some new clothes, but I didn’t need new clothes, I was doing just fine with the clothes I already had, because I didn’t look like a beggar or anything, no, even if some people probably thought I did, but these clothing stores were packed with clothes and that was probably the reason for this hinting, and also the reason why they didn’t want to sell me a needle and thread, but eventually there was someone standing in front of me, bowing to me, in a suit, dammit if he wasn’t wearing a pink tie, who said that if I wanted to buy a needle and a spool of black thread I would need to go to a tailor’s, and when I ventured to ask him where I might find a tailor this shopkeeper’s assistant, or maybe it was the store owner for all I knew, just laughed, he laughed long and loud with his mouth wide open and said how should he know, and then he said that there always used to be a tailor on Skostredet back in the day, but that was a long time ago, because it’s been a long time since there were any tailors in Bjørgvin or probably out on the coast in Strileland either, he said and then a woman came in through a door behind the counter that the man in the suit and pink tie was leaning on and asked a bit impatiently if there was something she could help with and the man in the suit and pink tie said yes, so, um, well, and then I mumbled that I wanted to buy a needle and a spool of black thread and she asked if I needed it to sew a loose button back on and I said yes, that’s what I wanted, and she said she could get that for me, yes, and then she disappeared through the door she had just come in through and the man in the pink tie said yes, yes, you see, the things I don’t know, the things I can’t do, and I asked if he’d just started working in the shop and he said he’d been working there his whole life, since he was a little boy, because the woman who’d just gone to get a needle and thread was his mother, and after his blessed father had died much too young it was Mother, as he put it, yes, she owned the shop, and he had never got any further in life than to work as a shop assistant for his own mother, he said and she was someone who sold anything she could, he could say that for sure, yes, she’d sell her own grandmother if it came to it, yes, that’s what they liked to say about enterprising salespeople in Bjørgvin, he said, so now his mother had probably gone upstairs to their apartment to find a needle and some thread in her own sewing kit, it wasn’t the first time she’d done that, yes, go get something from the apartment to sell it, that’s how his father’s wardrobe had disappeared, not all at once of course, it took its time, but eventually everything got sold, so I’d get my needle and thread all right, the man who was also her son said, and then we stood there not saying anything and then the door behind the counter opened and she came in, and she held up a spool of black thread and there was a needle stuck into the thread, I could see it and yes well here you have your needle and thread, she said, the widow, mother, and owner of a clothing shop in Bjørgvin, yes, I have everything anyone might want for sale, she said, with maybe a little pride in her voice, and her son in the suit wearing a pink tie shrugged, and he wasn’t exactly young, more like a male old maid by the look of him, but how can I think such a thing, to tell the truth I’m no less of an old maid than he is, probably more of one actually, since it seems like I’m a lot older than the son with the pink tie, but then again I had nothing womanly about me, not at all, but that guy, the son, in the suit, with the pink tie, yes, he was as feminine as he was masculine, and that’s probably why I’d hit on that phrase, old maid, yes, and his mother both looked like a man and was acting like one too and she held out her hand with that spool of thread with a needle stuck into it and she said to me

That’ll be two hundred and fifty kroner, she said

and I couldn’t believe it, two hundred and fifty kroner for a spool of black thread and a needle, yes, everyone knows that these Bjørgvin people sure gouge money out of people but this was above and beyond even for Bjørgvin, this was outrageous, exorbitant, yes that’s the word, exorbitant, there’s nothing else you can call it, I could buy myself a new shirt for that, several shirts, and avoid the trouble of sewing the button back on too, because it’s always a hassle, just getting the thread through the needle always takes me a long time, my eyesight isn’t the best, and even my glasses don’t help much when it comes to seeing the eye of the needle

Well, the woman standing behind the counter said with a kind of swagger

Well, what’ll it be, she said

and I had to just buy that needle and thread from this awful woman, owner of a clothing shop in the city of Bjørgvin, mother of a son in a pink tie, there was probably nothing else I could do, I thought and I took my wallet out of my jacket pocket, but really, no, I couldn’t, I couldn’t pay that much for a little needle and a little thread on a spool where most of the thread had already been used, yes, as far as I could tell there was only a little thread left on the spool, maybe not even enough to sew a single button on with, no, really, but once you start something you have to finish it, once a person’s said A they have to say B, as the saying goes, and if I said no to buying it now it would be kind of humiliating, yes, I’d probably look like a pauper in the eyes of this lady behind the counter, and that’s exactly what I didn’t want, I didn’t want to give her that pleasure, I’d rather she have the somewhat dubious pleasure of having cheated a man, of having cheated a country bumpkin from Strileland even, I thought as I stood there with my wallet in my hand and I took out a two-hundred-kroner note and a fifty and I put them down on the counter, I laid the money down without saying a word and as soon as I put the notes down they were in that woman’s hands, and then I stood there like a fool looking at the spool with a needle stuck into what was left of the black thread and she, the owner of this clothing shop in Bjørgvin, didn’t say anything and I didn’t either, I was glad I wasn’t going to give her an answer and her son, in the black suit and the pink tie, where had he gone off to?

(…)

Winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature

Jatgeir has come from Vaim to the big city, Bjørgvin, on his wooden boat, Eline, named after the long-lost love of his teenage years. He intends to buy a needle and thread to sew a button but he is cheated, twice. That night, while sleeping on his boat, he hears a familiar voice: unexpectedly, it is Eline, who wants to come home to Vaim with him. She leaves a note for her husband Frank, packs her bags and runs away while he is out fishing. Vaim, Jon Fosse’s first novel since he received the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature, is the story of this triangle, a novel about little boats and big boats, love and death, passive men and an incredibly determined woman. And all, of course, was strange…

‘Reading Jon Fosse is always a curious and wondrous experience. Vaim is no exception: it ferries the reader along the stream of the “ordinary” mind, from which suddenly shines forth a luminous beyond.’
— Xiaolu Guo, author of Call Me Ishmaelle

‘We are in the presence of rare literary greatness. It is for this greatness that the Swedish Academy has justly awarded Jon Fosse the Nobel prize.’
— Paul Binding, Times Literary Supplement

‘The Beckett of the twenty-first century.’
— Le Monde

‘Jon Fosse is a major European writer.’
— Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of The Wolves of Eternity

Praise for Morning and Evening

‘Fosse has a precious ear for the muted whimpers of grief; there are such depths of ache contained in this brief novel. That we begin the journey of dying as soon as we are born may be one of this book’s most effectively dramatized insights, but it succeeds, no less brilliantly, in conveying late-life pain and melancholia; what the days feel like once friends and lovers are gone and we have but our own vanishing selves for company.’
— Yagnishsing Dawoor, Observer

‘Fosse’s distinctive prose style – a spare, elegant minimalism deftly complicated by stylized, mesmeric repetitions – conjures a suitably haunting atmosphere, a sense of a once familiar world turned uncannily strange…. The result is a work of graceful, spine-tingling beauty.’
— Houman Barekat, Financial Times

‘Something in the critical self is shed in the process of reading Fosse, only to be replaced by something more primal. A mood. An atmosphere. The sound of words moving on a page.’
— Ruth Margalit, New York Review of Books

‘Damion Searls’ translation is delicate and rhythmic. Fosse is a great novelist of our time, and if you haven’t already discovered him for yourself, this short, sublime novel may be the perfect opportunity.’
— Rónán Hession, Irish Times

‘[Fosse’s] books … make repeated returns to the edges of descriptive possibility, to the indefinite blind fields of the unsaid. They are poised, that is, ever-wonderingly on the threshold between silent contemplation and our irrepressible need to explain…. The narrative is spirited by the past – as it washes over the present – and bears, at all points, that typically quiet music of Fosse’s prose, the idiom through which he thinks, and which allows an elegant and complex disquisition on memory, loss, solitude, and companionship to take place.’
— Jack Barron, Arts Desk

Praise for A Shining

‘A Shining can be read in many ways: as a realistic monologue; as a fable; as a Christian-inflected allegory; as a nightmare painstakingly recounted the next morning, the horror of the experience still pulsing under the words, though somewhat mitigated by the small daily miracle of daylight. I think the great splendour of Fosse’s fiction is that it so deeply rejects any singular interpretation; as one reads, the story does not sound a clear singular note, but rather becomes a chord with all the many possible interpretations ringing out at once. This refusal to succumb to the solitary, the stark, the simple, the binary – to insist that complicated things like death and God retain their immense mysteries and contradictions – seems, in this increasingly partisan world of ours, a quietly powerful moral stance.’
— Lauren Groff, Guardian

‘Fosse’s prose doesn’t speak so much as witnesses, unfolds, accumulates. It flows like consciousness itself…. This is perhaps why A Shining feels so momentous, even at fewer than 50 pages. You never quite know where you’re going. But it doesn’t matter: you want to follow, to move in step with the rhythm of these words.’
— Matthew Janney, Financial Times

Jon Fosse was born in 1959 on the west coast of Norway and is the recipient of countless prestigious prizes, both in his native Norway and abroad. Since his 1983 fiction debut, Raudt, svart [Red, Black], Fosse has written prose, poetry, essays, short stories, children’s books and over forty plays. In 2023, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable’.

Damion Searls is a translator from German, Norwegian, French and Dutch, and a writer in English. He has translated ten books by Jon Fosse, including the three books of Septology.

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