Vime Review of John Foss – Nobel Prize Winner Performs a Strange Miracle | John Foss

“I “I have always known that writing can save lives,” Norwegian writer John Foss said in his acceptance speech for the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature. “And if my writing can also help save the lives of others, nothing will make me happier.” It is rare for a novelist to speak this language these days: fiction tends to know its lowly status. Foss, also a poet and essayist, and one of the world’s most famous playwrights, follows his own path. Case in point: Septology (2019-2021), published in three volumes, running over 800 pages, and containing a single sentence. But forget the formality; His novels, often set in a fjord in Norway, are dissociative episodes, quiet and incantatory, and emotionally overwhelming.

At less than 120 pages, Fame, his first new work since winning the Nobel Prize, is a small piece of something. Divided into three sections, each narrated by a different character, it begins with Gatjer sailing on a small boat from the small town of Faim to the large city of Björgiffen. His mission is to buy a needle and thread to repair the missing button. It is a long journey, and in not just one but two stores, he is subjected to a royal robbery, being charged fees far beyond the odds of a single reel. He complains and gets angry, but says nothing to the shop owners themselves. What the heck, we might think. What a piece of wood.

Gatjer, part Prufrock, part sad sitcom, lives alone in the house of his dead parents. His curtains are beige, his hair is gray, and he sometimes shaves his beard. Far from being wealthy, he is invisible to the women around him. He often finds himself returning to Elaine, “the secret love of my youth.” When he named his boat after her, the locals laughed and she walked away. How amazing, even ridiculous, then that on the night of his humiliation with sewing thread, Elaine woke him from his sleep calling his name. She says she wants him to save her from her fisherman husband. Back to Fame Sailing.

This could be quite a romantic story, were it not a Fosse novel. The story stops, and Jatgir’s only friend – the religiously minded Ilyas – picks it up again. This time the narrative baton is handed to Frank, the husband whom Ellen left behind in the first section. Ellen herself, though central to everything that happens, is out of reach. More may come out about her later (Vaim is the first volume in a planned trilogy), but all that’s revealed here is that she was a “very silly girl,” who left home young and worked for a wealthy family. Her ability to make men do her bidding is unnerving, a kind of magic; She appears spectral, a character from medieval dream poetry.

Mystery shrouds the entire novel. Gatjer wonders if Eileen is a mirage, describes their encounter as “incomprehensible, unimaginable”, and reflects on how “a dream is a dream and reality is reality, but somehow reality has always been, yes, no, no not like a dream, but reality has had something dream-like about it probably all my life, reality is in the dream the way a boat is in the water.” The scenes take place in the dark when day blends with night. There is mysterious knocking on doors, talk of ghosts, and even mention of an institution that often appears in Fosse’s novels: the madhouse.

The characters are also blurry and decaying. Eileen, whose name sounds close to Elias, was not born Eileen. Jatgir, whose name is not Jatgir, cannot remember whether his niece was called Gudrun Anna or Anna Gudrun. Men who tend toward the negative are like “old maids”; Female characters are purposeful and “masculine.” At the same time, time is bending and ambiguous – except for a passing reference to a car, the book could have been set 100 years or more ago. Evocations of the past and good old days abound, but it is often unclear whether what is being referred to actually happened more recently.

Foss spoke of his novels as “mystical realism.” For all the rambling metaphysics and wonderfully repetitive beats in this one-sentence novel, it’s those passages grounded in everyday life that stand out—scenes featuring meatballs and rice pudding, comparisons between American and European purses, and Gatjer admitting that for most of his life he felt closer to boats than to any woman. (He treats himself through masturbatory care – “I laid my hand flat on the plank of the boat and gently rubbed my hand back and forth along the plank and then sat there as I fell into an almost half-sleep”).

“Everything was strange”: That’s what Gatjer hopes will be written on his tombstone. It’s also the lasting feeling when you finish Vaim. How could prose so simple—pillows “nice,” action “authoritative”—vibrate with such feeling? How could it be so coastal, and capture the light, spray and tidal rhythm of this seascape so powerfully? How can a novelist make the reader feel lost and found at the same time? It’s strange. Strange miracle.