More narratively conventional than Fosse’s earlier work, and less ambitious than Septology, it strikes me as a deliberately incomplete work ... These narrators compel us from page to page, sweeping us along on a tide of modest events, insisting on each new development with the intimate immediacy of real life. But no moment really rises above any other, and the novel goes slack even in moments of ostensible urgency. We listen to the accounts of these men, and when they fall silent, the novel does too. Like water washing over a deck, Vaim soaks the skin, but is quickly gone.
An oddly mesmerizing little fable about—perhaps—patience, grace and fate. While there is something dispiritingly reductive about the trope of the bossy woman and supine man, there is much to admire in Mr. Fosse’s rhythmic prose, his bursts of humor and heightened sense of life’s pervasive oddness.
[An] exhilarating English translation ... Full of doubts about language and communicability, ambivalence around word choice; narrators grasp mutely at those things and feelings that cannot be articulated, and events that in a traditional novel would be major climaxes transpire almost without comment. Language does not build a world here—its faults make the world’s solidity crumble.
In the third part of the book Fosse rounds off the story neatly with the perspective of Frank ... Whereas Septology was profound and meditative, Vaim is more mysterious and playful. The translation by Damion Searls is, as ever, excellently judged in its rhythms and tones. The narrative has a folk tale quality about it ... A satisfyingly constructed story, Vaim shows Fosse shedding his heavy philosophical burdens (temporarily at least) to enjoy himself as a storyteller.
Quiet and incantatory, emotionally overwhelming ... Part Prufrock, part sitcom sadsack ... Ambiguity mists the whole novel ... How can prose that is so simple – cushions are ‘nice’, work is ‘trusty’ – pulse with such feeling? ... It’s those passages grounded in the everyday that pop ... A strange miracle.
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.
