Vaim

Nobel winner Fosse (Septology) centers this spectacular story of loneliness, love, and death on three linked characters living in small-town Norway. It begins with Jatgeir, a middle-aged bachelor in Vaim, a village on the Sygnefjord. During a visit to Bergen on his prized motorboat, Eline, he's painfully aware of being clocked by shopkeepers as a "dumb hick from Strileland," even though he's not from those coastal islands. That night, after a stop for dinner on one of the islands, Sund, Jatgeir has a strange and miraculous encounter with Eline, whom he always loved and had just been thinking about. They grew up in Vaim together, and he was mercilessly mocked for naming his boat after her, especially after she left town and married a Sund fisherman named Frank. Now, Eline wants a ride home fast; she's desperate to escape her unhappy marriage before Frank returns from a fishing expedition. It would ruin this endlessly magical and surprising novel to summarize what happens next, as the narration shifts from Jatgeir to Eline and finally to Frank, the latter summing it all up with understated humor when he considers having his epitaph read, "all was strange." Jatgeir's sections also contain indelible turns of phrase, as when he wonders if he's imagining Eline's reappearance: "reality is in the dream the way the boat is in the water." This is unforgettable. (Oct.)

Three residents of a coastal Norwegian town ponder life, love, and what might've been. This slim novel by the Norwegian neomodernist and Nobel Prize winner is a single sentence in three sections, each from a resident in a small fishing community. The first, narrated by a man named Jatgeir, follows him on an errand to acquire a needle and thread, during which he's interrupted by his longtime secret love, Eline, who asks him to literally ferry her away from her failing marriage. The second section is narrated by Elias, a neighbor of Jatgeir's and bemused observer, and the third by Frank, the troublesome husband mentioned in the first section. Curiously, Eline doesn't get an opportunity to narrate her side of things, which intensifies her place as a muse or possession. (Jatgeir has named his boat theEline while Frank's boat is named theElinor. Names are fluid, underscoring the theme of shaky identities.) The story is infused with themes of regret and uncertainty, and the run-on sentence intensifies the feeling, as if each character is trying, only semisuccessfully, to determine what their feelings are. ("No, that's embarrassing, I think, it's almost enough to make me turn red, I think, no, how could I ever have come up with the idea of doing that," Jatgeir muses, in a typically elliptical passage.) Fosse doesn't put a period at the end of this novel's long sentence, but the story does reach a resolution. Still, Fosse's main goal is to generate an atmosphere of closed-off men struggling. (The novel opens with Jatgeir getting gouged while purchasing a needle and thread; Frank recalls needing to be falling-down drunk to introduce himself to Eline.) Typical of Fosse's fiction, the novel uses a recursive style to convey confusion and listlessness, with occasional meditations on love and faith. No clear answers arrive, but it's a fine portrait of uncertainty. Glum subject matter enlivened by Fosse's graceful, fluid style. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.