Vaim E-Book

Jon Fosse

• Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 181

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Jatgeir has come from Vaim to the big city, Bjørgvin, on his wooden boat, Eline, named after the long-lost love of his teenage years. He intends to buy a needle and thread to sew a button but he is cheated, twice. That night, while sleeping on his boat, he hears a familiar voice: unexpectedly, it is Eline, who wants to come home to Vaim with him. She leaves a note for her husband Frank, packs her bags and runs away while he is out fishing. Vaim, Jon Fosse's first novel since he received the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature, is the story of this triangle, a novel about little boats and big boats, love and death, passive men and an incredibly determined woman. And all, of course, was strange… 

Leseprobe

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‘Jon Fosse is a major European writer.’

— Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of The Wolves of Eternity

‘The Beckett of the twenty-first century.’

— Le Monde

‘Fosse’s distinctive prose style – a spare, elegant minimalism deftly complicated by stylized, mesmeric repetitions – conjures a suitably haunting atmosphere, a sense of a once familiar world turned uncannily strange.’

— Houman Barekat, Financial Times

‘Fosse is a great novelist of our time.’

— Rónán Hession, Irish Times

‘I think the great splendour of Fosse’s fiction is that it so deeply rejects any singular interpretation; as one reads, the story does not sound a clear singular note, but rather becomes a chord with all the many possible interpretations ringing out at once. This refusal to succumb to the solitary, the stark, the simple, the binary – to insist that complicated things like death and God retain their immense mysteries and contradictions – seems, in this increasingly partisan world of ours, a quietly powerful moral stance.’

— Lauren Groff, Guardian

‘He touches you so deeply when you read him, and when you have read one work you have to continue…. What is special with him is the closeness in his writing. It touches on the deepest feelings that you have – anxieties, insecurities, questions of life and death – such things that every human being actually confronts from the very beginning. In that sense I think he reaches very far and there is a sort of universal impact of everything that he writes.’

— Anders Olsson, Nobel committee 4

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VAIM

JON FOSSE

Translated by DAMION SEARLS

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Contents

Title PageIIIIIIAbout the AuthorsCopyright

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I

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So, I said, well here we are, I said and I ran my fingers through my beard, my greying beard, I wasn’t young anymore, no, but I wasn’t an old man either, it would probably be fair to say ageing, yes, an ageing man, neither more nor less, and it was about time I stopped taking these little sprees to Bjørgvin, what was the point anymore, tying up at the quay of The Wharf in Bjørgvin and not using my time there to do anything but sit in a bar or restaurant or café, yes, usually The Fowl, that’s what they call the place, but sometimes I’d go to The Food Hall or The Last Boat, or The Coffeehouse – other than going somewhere like that or just staying in the cabin of my boat there wasn’t really anything to do, or, well, the first day, or first couple of days, there’d be something I needed to buy, yes, always, this or that, there’d be one thing or another that I’d thought might come in handy and I’d written it down on a sheet of paper on my living room table back home, something I couldn’t get at The Vaim General Store but that would come in handy, it was always different, it could be anything, yes, over the years I’d gradually bought everything I really needed but a needle and some black thread to sew a loose button back on, yes, that’s what I needed to buy this year, but actually it was a lot harder than you’d think to buy a single needle and a single spool of black thread in the city of Bjørgvin, Norway’s second biggest city, it was almost unbelievable how hard it was, you’d almost think that the shopkeepers didn’t want to bother selling something as small as a needle and spool of thread, because I’d walked from one clothing shop to the next and none of them had anything like that for sale, no, they said, no, we don’t carry that, and you’d have to say that there was something a little bit mocking in their answer, and in their face behind that answer, and when I asked where I might be able to buy it the answer was always the same, no, we 10 don’t know, sometimes they would add that they don’t sell needle and thread in this shop, only clothes, ready-to-wear clothes as they put it, and now if I wanted to buy myself some new clothes, if I could afford it, and I have to admit that one of them, or maybe more than one of them, was hinting that I needed some new clothes, but I didn’t need new clothes, I was doing just fine with the clothes I already had, because I didn’t look like a beggar or anything, no, even if some people probably thought I did, but these clothing stores were packed with clothes and that was probably the reason for this hinting, and also the reason why they didn’t want to sell me a needle and thread, but eventually there was someone standing in front of me, bowing to me, in a suit, dammit if he wasn’t wearing a pink tie, who said that if I wanted to buy a needle and a spool of black thread I would need to go to a tailor’s, and when I ventured to ask him where I might find a tailor this shopkeeper’s assistant, or maybe it was the store owner for all I knew, just laughed, he laughed long and loud with his mouth wide open and said how should he know, and then he said that there always used to be a tailor on Skostredet back in the day, but that was a long time ago, because it’s been a long time since there were any tailors in Bjørgvin or probably out on the coast in Strileland either, he said and then a woman came in through a door behind the counter that the man in the suit and pink tie was leaning on and asked a bit impatiently if there was something she could help with and the man in the suit and pink tie said yes, so, um, well, and then I mumbled that I wanted to buy a needle and a spool of black thread and she asked if I needed it to sew a loose button back on and I said yes, that’s what I wanted, and she said she could get that for me, yes, and then she disappeared through the door she had just come in through and the man in the 11 pink tie said yes, yes, you see, the things I don’t know, the things I can’t do, and I asked if he’d just started working in the shop and he said he’d been working there his whole life, since he was a little boy, because the woman who’d just gone to get a needle and thread was his mother, and after his blessed father had died much too young it was Mother, as he put it, yes, she owned the shop, and he had never got any further in life than to work as a shop assistant for his own mother, he said and she was someone who sold anything she could, he could say that for sure, yes, she’d sell her own grandmother if it came to it, yes, that’s what they liked to say about enterprising salespeople in Bjørgvin, he said, so now his mother had probably gone upstairs to their apartment to find a needle and some thread in her own sewing kit, it wasn’t the first time she’d done that, yes, go get something from the apartment to sell it, that’s how his father’s wardrobe had disappeared, not all at once of course, it took its time, but eventually everything got sold, so I’d get my needle and thread all right, the man who was also her son said, and then we stood there not saying anything and then the door behind the counter opened and she came in, and she held up a spool of black thread and there was a needle stuck into the thread, I could see it and yes well here you have your needle and thread, she said, the widow, mother, and owner of a clothing shop in Bjørgvin, yes, I have everything anyone might want for sale, she said, with maybe a little pride in her voice, and her son in the suit wearing a pink tie shrugged, and he wasn’t exactly young, more like a male old maid by the look of him, but how can I think such a thing, to tell the truth I’m no less of an old maid than he is, probably more of one actually, since it seems like I’m a lot older than the son with the pink tie, but then again I had nothing womanly about me, not at all, but that 12 guy, the son, in the suit, with the pink tie, yes, he was as feminine as he was masculine, and that’s probably why I’d hit on that phrase, old maid, yes, and his mother both looked like a man and was acting like one too and she held out her hand with that spool of thread with a needle stuck into it and she said to me

That’ll be two hundred and fifty kroner, she said

and I couldn’t believe it, two hundred and fifty kroner for a spool of black thread and a needle, yes, everyone knows that these Bjørgvin people sure gouge money out of people but this was above and beyond even for Bjørgvin, this was outrageous, exorbitant, yes that’s the word, exorbitant, there’s nothing else you can call it, I could buy myself a new shirt for that, several shirts, and avoid the trouble of sewing the button back on too, because it’s always a hassle, just getting the thread through the needle always takes me a long time, my eyesight isn’t the best, and even my glasses don’t help much when it comes to seeing the eye of the needle

Well, the woman standing behind the counter said with a kind of swagger

Well, what’ll it be, she said

and I had to just buy that needle and thread from this awful woman, owner of a clothing shop in the city of Bjørgvin, mother of a son in a pink tie, there was probably nothing else I could do, I thought and I took my wallet out of my jacket pocket, but really, no, I couldn’t, I couldn’t pay that much for a little needle and a little thread on a spool where most of the thread had already been used, yes, as far as I could tell there was only a little thread left on the spool, maybe not even enough to sew a single button on with, no, really, but once you start something you have to finish it, once a person’s said A they have to say B, as the saying goes, and if I said no to buying it now it 13 would be kind of humiliating, yes, I’d probably look like a pauper in the eyes of this lady behind the counter, and that’s exactly what I didn’t want, I didn’t want to give her that pleasure, I’d rather she have the somewhat dubious pleasure of having cheated a man, of having cheated a country bumpkin from Strileland even, I thought as I stood there with my wallet in my hand and I took out a two-hundred-kroner note and a fifty and I put them down on the counter, I laid the money down without saying a word and as soon as I put the notes down they were in that woman’s hands, and then I stood there like a fool looking at the spool with a needle stuck into what was left of the black thread and she, the owner of this clothing shop in Bjørgvin, didn’t say anything and I didn’t either, I was glad I wasn’t going to give her an answer and her son, in the black suit and the pink tie, where had he gone off to? I looked all around the shop and it was a big and nice shop, I had to admit that, and there, way in the back, in front of a mirror, was the son, grooming himself, running the palm of his hand over his hair, straightening his tie, standing up straight to his full height making himself look as thin as he could and I put the needle and thread in my pocket and thought now, yes, now I’ve got to get out of this hellish shop, the sooner the better, and I headed for the door without saying a word and behind me I heard the mother and son saying as if with one voice thanks for coming in, hope to see you again, if there’s anything else the gentleman needs or wants, thanks for coming in and hope to see you again, I heard behind me, and the words were still echoing in my ears even when I was back out on the streets of Bjørgvin and never again, never again would I set foot in that clothing shop, never, never, I thought, because I’d never been cheated that badly in my whole life probably, I thought, and now I had to get back home to 14Vaim, I thought, and why did I always take these boat trips to Bjørgvin anyway, they never really had any point, these excursions, when I had a few days off work then yes I’d just go to Bjørgvin, but it wasn’t so often nowadays either, I thought, not for the past few years anyway, yes, for many years now I’d only taken one trip a year on a summer’s day even though back when I was younger, yes, back then I would constantly be coming to Bjørgvin, one or two days off and I’d head out, and back then I was a regular customer at the bars, and the reason why was probably that I was hoping, even though I didn’t want to admit it, yes, I was hoping to meet someone, yes, someone to share my life with, as they say, but no, not this time, as they say, yes, and now I’ve got so old that the hope is gone, I’m alone and I’ll stay alone, yes, that’s how it is on that subject and that’s how it’ll stay too, yes, so now I took these trips to Bjørgvin just to buy something I couldn’t get at The Vaim General Store, but actually there was and is little or nothing I couldn’t get at The Vaim General Store, they sell most things, all kinds of things, yes, it was only things like this needle and thread that made me think I’d better go to Bjørgvin to get those, although, strictly speaking, one button more or less didn’t matter since really I just putter around and take care of myself in my house, my home, my childhood home as they say, where I was born and where I hope I’ll die, the same way both of my parents passed away there, I lived there while they were alive and then after they died too, yes, then I lived there alone, since I was an only child, yes, I’ve lived in my childhood home my whole life, and now since I live there alone there’s no one to see or notice if a button is missing, yes, and if it’s a button on my trousers I can always just keep my trousers up with a belt, and I have plenty of belts, or even with some rope if it came to that, which it hasn’t, 15 but on the other hand yes you’d have to say it’s good to have a needle and thread around, and I’m sure that I have some too, it’s just that I forgot where I put it, or, yes, well, it’s pretty much certain that it’s in the desk drawer where I have my other sewing things that I inherited from my mother, I threw away most of what she left behind, although it took me a while, but the things I could use, like a needle and thread, yes, I kept those, I’m not that big a fool, but, yes, but then why in the world would I go to Bjørgvin to buy a needle and thread even though I most likely had what I needed at home, yes, well, I guess I just thought I should, so actually I was just looking for an excuse to take a little boat trip to Bjørgvin while I was off for the summer and didn’t need to go to work, even though maybe I was getting, yes, well, kind of sick of these boat trips, yes, and really it would be nicer if I wasn’t always in the boat by myself, there was only one time I had a travelling companion, that’s maybe what you call it, and that was when Elias came with me, but that was many years ago now, and also it took years before Elias agreed to come to Bjørgvin with me, I asked him over and over again if he wanted to come but he’d hem and haw and say he was no sailor, he never felt comfortable on the water, but finally, one beautiful summer’s day when he dropped by to visit and I mentioned I was taking a boat trip to Bjørgvin he said he’d love to come, sure, and the next day there he was standing outside my house with an old grey rucksack on, and then we walked down to the boat and set out, but he sure wasn’t much of a crew, the good man, he got pale after just a little time at sea and he didn’t have much talk in him, he just sat there, pale and kind of run-down, then we docked at The Wharf in Bjørgvin and he had a little talk in him, and then I mentioned that we could go drop by The Strileland Liquor Store and he was 16 totally terrified and he said no, no, and that’s the only thing I can remember him saying on that whole trip, and so obviously Elias didn’t come on the boat with me again, but we drop by each other’s house for a visit a lot, yes, he’ll look in on me once a week or so or I’ll look in on him, in his little house, even though we’re so different we stick together, yes, it’s fair to say that he’s the only friend I have in Vaim, yes, Elias, yes, I don’t remember when he came to Vaim and moved into that house but it was many years ago now, and I also don’t remember when we met each other and started dropping by each other’s house but it was many years ago, and one other thing’s for sure, that after that failed trip to Bjørgvin I never asked him again if he wanted to come on the boat with me, we never brought up that whole Bjørgvin trip again, to tell the truth probably neither of us liked to think about it, but anyway it’s good that I have Elias to talk to, because there’s no one else I see in Vaim, and the part of that trip I remember best is probably the look on Elias’s face when I asked him if we should stop by The Strileland Liquor Store, back then I used to stop by there whenever I came to Bjørgvin and buy a bottle or two of whisky, but there was something in Elias’s face when I asked him if we should go there that, well, that maybe he wanted to forget, but we never talked about it, so there was no trip to The Strileland Liquor Store that time, and now it’s been many years since I’ve been in there, and it was probably called that because it was on Sea Lane and people from Strileland always used to come to Bjørgvin by boat and tie up at The Wharf, yes, even now that lots of people had their own car there were plenty of people who did that, came to Bjørgvin in their own boat, yes, and most of the people from Strileland bought what they wanted to drink at The Strileland Liquor Store, the ones with their own 17 car too, yes, that’s how it was and is, I think and I barely noticed the street I was walking on I was so worked up about having bought that needle and thread, one needle and one barely half-full spool of black thread had cost me two hundred and fifty kroner, but what’s done is done, so now I just needed to get back to my boat, my nice little motorboat, and then I needed to get back to Vaim, because I didn’t have much to do in Bjørgvin to tell the truth, back in the day, when I was young, just a kid, yes, I would always look forward to these boat trips to Bjørgvin, being in my boat for the hours it took to get to Bjørgvin, and then finding a place to tie up somewhere along The Wharf, yes, and that was kind of exciting too, because especially on summer days there might not be much space along The Wharf, and as for tying up to another boat, tying up to its side facing away from The Wharf, the way some people did when The Wharf was full of boats, no, I’ve never done that and I never will either, it would feel too crowded, and too aggressive, no, I’d never be able to relax if my boat was tied to another boat, I wouldn’t be able to sleep even, I’ll be damned if I’d ever cook myself a meal on board, not to mention use the head, no, never, so if there was nowhere to dock along The Wharf I would turn right around and pull slowly out into The Bay and then set my course for the island of Sartor, because there were lots of good harbours out there, with shops on land and nice quays too where you could tie up and spend the night in peace and quiet, yes, my goodness I felt like the best thing to do now would be to just set out from Bjørgvin and head towards Sartor, yes, maybe go to Sund on Sartor, because there was a good quay there, that always had a spot to tie up your boat, and there was a shop there, The Grocery Store, that sold everything you can imagine, yes, maybe even more things than The Vaim 18