Jatgeir travels from the fishing village of Vaim to the city in search of a needle and thread. Cheated twice, he returns to his boat, where he falls asleep as waves rock the hull. Soon he is awakened by a voice: a woman is calling his name from the quay. There stands Eline, the secret love of his youth—and the namesake of his boat—with a packed suitcase. Eline pleads to come aboard. In what follows, this single encounter reverberates across three stories: three narrators, three deaths.
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] 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.
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.
