Vaim Hotel by Jon Fosse

Vaim Hotel by Jon Fosse

Norwegian fiction

Original title: Vaim Hotel

Translator: Damion Searls

Source: Subscription book

There is often a feeling that when a writer wins the Nobel, they struggle to write after they win. They struggle with their next book. Well this is now the second part of Fosse latest trilogy. I had reviewed Vaim earlier this year; in fact, it is one of my favourite books so far this year. So when this arrived the other day, I had to read it straight away. I wasn’t sure whether it continued the story or was a different one. Well, it is a bit of both; the book is set in a small Norwegian village of Vaim. But it has the same setting but a new cast of characters.

Why exactly I came to Vaim and checked into The Vaim Hotel, no, I don’t know, I just took my leather shoulder bag, put my two suitcases in the boot of the car, a brown estate car I’d bought only the day before, and drove off, I didn’t know where I was going, but something would work out, I thought as I drove along and let the road take me wherever it wanted to take me, and after I’d driven for a few hours, when I saw the sign for Vaim at the side of the road, it felt like I’d driven long enough and I decided to stop there, or take a break from driving there anyway, because Vaim, yes, well, I had heard of it, but I’d never been to Vaim as far as I could remember, and if there was a hotel in Vaim then, yes, I wanted to check in there, I thought and when I saw the sign for The Vaim General Store on the wall of a building I turned off the road down by the shop, and I saw a quay in front of me, and there, on the left, yes, there was a whitewashed building with Vaim Hotel painted on it in black letters, so if the hotel was still open and running I could get a room for the night there, but chances were that the hotel was probably closed, there were lots of old hotels like this one around the countryside here and there that had had their day and were now closed,

The opening as he arrives not quite sure why

An unnamed narrator arrives with his shoulder bag and two cases.He isn’t quite sure why he’s done this, but when he passes the small village of Vaim, he decides to stop at the whitewashed Hotel. He isn’t sure, as he says many of these hotels are now closed. But when the door opens, the story starts. The owner greets him in a weird way, almost as though she knew him .But he has never been to Vaim or met anyone from Vaim. But he has a past incident many years ago; was this the event she was referring to? So, when in a hotel that seems empty, he is given room 407 on the fourth floor . He is bewildered, and when the woman Britta appears and tells him a small thing she has already told him, he starts to feel odd. Then, when he goes for a walk, another local, a sailor, talks to him. He is again left with a strange feeling.Then he goes to the shop, and the shopkeeper makes him buy a fishing set. Then he goes to the restaurant owned by Britta, where the sailor he met earlier is drinking. Over the course of the evening, he has more weird things happen. The sailor tells him a secret about the shopkeeper and Britta. The book ends with Britta talking about the man.

We called him The Guest, I never found out what his real name was, but the reason he stayed at Vaim Hotel was that he couldn’t pay his bill, for the simple reason that he couldn’t find his wallet, and he never found it again and to tell the truth I often thought it was a good thing he never found his wallet, because since he couldn’t pay his bill, yes, well, he had to work, it was good, yes, good for both him and me, and he was very useful to have around, because I really needed a helper, he wasn’t exactly especially handy, but of course he was much better than no one, the first thing I had him do was change the bulbs in the ceiling lights of all the rooms and when he was done I counted how many bulbs there were in the used light bulb bag, and the number was right, there were forty light bulbs in there, but I didn’t understand why the new light bulbs he put in burned out so quickly, the only explanation I could think of was that he just put the new light bulbs in the bag meant for the old ones instead of screwing the new ones in so that it would look like he’d changed all the bulbs the way I’d asked him to, but of course I can’t be sure of that,

Britta talks about him disappearing as a new guest arrives !

Again, he has written a book that coils in on itself; the story ends as it started, like Vaim did. The sailor is maybe Jatgeir from the first book. The boat he owns is called the Eline!! Is it the same shopkeeper that ripped him off as well? The story has a Pinteresque feel of never quite feeling safe, as the narrator does. Britta is an odd character; what does she know? Why does the narrator have a room on the top floor? I love some of the humour around a fishing set that appears and disappears, and whose is it?  The sailor told him this about how the village works. So in the last bit of the book, a new guest replaces the old guest who had vanished out of the blue. The Mobius coil of the narrative is similar to Vaim; the feeling that the book is starting a new guest again gives the sense of de ja vu, and then there are the unanswered questions about the guest and what has. happened? Have you read Fosse? This is review 1599 so bring on 1600!