In Review: Jon Fosse’s Vaim Hotel

Lydia Tadross Marks reviews Jon Fosse’s Vaim Hotel 

In a rare in-person interview with the legendary writer, the critic Merve Emre told Jon Fosse she was ‘uneasy’ at the idea that the Man and Woman in his play, Someone Is Going to Come (1996), want to be alone together. Fosse responds, in English: ‘But they share this belonging. That’s their way. [...] The world is a hard place to be. They think that they can somehow escape that.’

This exchange is a particularly illuminating representation of the dialogic relationship between Fosse and his readership. Fosse’s ‘but’ is part of a larger trend in his oeuvre, in which isolation is banal, even normal. It’s ‘their way.’ I don’t, however, get the sense that Fosse intends to universally represent isolation as loneliness. And it makes us uneasy, especially considering the futility of the Man and Woman’s escape, a futility Fosse himself acknowledges. Critics often use words like ‘uncanny,’ ‘strange,’ and ‘incomplete’ when referring to his work. This is usually meant positively: Fosse creates dreamlike, affective, fragmented scenes, sometimes without logic. And yet meaning emerges.

One possible explanation for this persistent search for meaning lies in the theological framework that informs Fosse’s work; unlike many of his literary peers, Fosse’s search is overtly and consistently incorporated into his public persona, lectures, and writing. In fact, out of the ten most recent Nobel laureates, eight do not advertise set religious philosophies, with the exceptions of Fosse and Abdulrazak Gurnah. In 2013, after a time of self-described atheism, Fosse converted to Quakerism, then Catholicism, and addressed his alcoholism and addiction issues. All of these experiences, these various -isms, contribute to the body of Fosse’s work today. Septology (2021), which is considered Fosse’s magnum opus, grapples with theodicy and reflects on death. But the Vaim novels, which can be read alone or as a trilogy, adopt a lighter register than the more overtly theological Septology. Readers of the “first” book, Vaim (2025), will notice few threads attaching the two works, but Vaim Hotel is happy to stand alone. Even Fosse’s novels are isolated from one another; rather than tying the texts together narratively, they are loosely connected through thematic explorations and the Norwegian setting.

Vaim Hotel is funny, mostly in that it is absurdist. Despite this, and unlike some of Fosse’s other work, it is earthbound. Vaim Hotel is about a protagonist, eventually referred to as The Guest, who checks into a hotel in the fictional Norwegian town of Vaim. I had no sense of God when reading. Rather, both the reading experience and the content of the text are purgatorial. Vaim Hotel is written contiguously in one long, taut sentence (meaning it’s very difficult to avoid reading in one sitting - I was stuck reading), as our protagonist remains semi-willfully stranded in a strange, remote place. The Guest wants to be left alone, but is consistently assigned to complete small, arbitrary tasks that, for some undisclosed reason, he doesn’t say no to.

The townspeople seem to think that they’ve already met The Guest, although he hasn’t stayed in Vaim before, as far as he can remember. Everything is a little off: the food is too delicious, the town too empty. The Sailor (a familiar face to readers of Vaim) is the only character who speaks to The Guest without immediately wanting something from him besides his company. The townspeople’s forgetfulness and The Guest’s anonymity - although he is, to some extent, identifiable as ‘familiar,’ but has no particular physical or identitary traits to identify him as such - contribute to the lack of spirituality in Vaim Hotel.

In trying to interrogate Vaim Hotel’s peculiarities, we can turn to existentialist thinkers. For existentialists, isolation is spiritually empty; Sartre writes that while people are, by nature, ‘alone,’ meaning is created through engagement with others. For Dostoyevsky, hell is the inability to love, which stems from spiritual isolation; it denies the fundamental nature of reality, which most philosophical schools agree to be relational. And even God is met through the other. Martin Buber, known for his philosophy of dialogue, writes that the divine is not encountered in total solitude, but in profound encounters between conscious beings. But encounters in Vaim Hotel are not only sparse and forgetful, they are also often unpleasant for The Guest, who prefers to be left alone. 

We, like the residents of Vaim, can almost recognize The Guest. He seems familiar enough with himself, but it is almost as if the reader suffers from a kind of amnesia about his life, as if we should know who he is, but can’t seem to remember. There are occasional insights into his interiority: he packed photos of him and the woman he ‘used to be married to’; his picture was in the newspaper once, ‘that time, yes, the consequences of that lasted a long time, yes, they were lifelong,’ he thinks.

But he doesn’t dwell on his memories, or why they might know him besides the fact that he was in a newspaper once, for reasons unrevealed to the reader. He spends the short, contiguous novel running around in circles as the hotel manager, Brita, and the shopkeeper play a trick on him. He loses his wallet, so he can’t pay for his room and check out of the hotel. The Guest’s narration is full of ‘I think’s’ and ‘maybe’s’ as he struggles to make sense of his new life and what is real.

In this way, Fosse reminds me of Dostoyevsky. The two share a fascination with surroundings that reflect the moral condition of their character. Fosse is drawn to protagonists who experience life as a form of spiritual trial. As in Crime and Punishment, our protagonist in Vaim Hotel seems to inhabit a purgatorial state as he runs around, accomplishing little. Whatever he did to get his face in the paper haunts him, if only in his mind (as we later discover, it is not from a newspaper photo that The Guest is familiar to the townspeople). He is trapped in this strange place, fixing ceiling lights in the hotel, eating delicious food, fishing, all while suspecting that Brita stole his wallet.

Fosse withholds exposition, rather than memory, as the reader is denied access to the protagonist’s reflections about the photograph in the newspaper or his past more broadly, simply because his attention is more fixated on the circumstance directly before him. This is another facet of the moral quandary of solitude. The Guest is not “good” in the Christian sense, as virtues like compassion and charity cannot exist in a vacuum; they require an “other” to be practiced. The Guest keeps to himself, both as he forgets to inform (or worse, hides) the reader of his past, and as he has traveled to Vaim, seemingly, to be or to remain alone. Dostoyevsky would say that we are all responsible for one another’s sins. The Guest refuses such a responsibility. Unlike Dostoyevsky’s Rodya, The Guest doesn’t reflect on his “crime,” nor does he necessarily have one. Fosse imagines an alternative form of narration in which some memories remain private because the narrator simply doesn’t think of them.

Fosse, too, refuses a certain level of responsibility to his reader. Although he never stops thinking, and the sentence builds and builds, the reader leaves Vaim Hotel knowing little about its protagonist. Diverging from Annie Ernaux and Henry James’ use of ellipses, Fosse uses the single, stream-of-consciousness sentence to provide The Guest with a certain level of separation from the reader. He narrates what is in front of him, so he never reflects back, besides through brief intrusions. The protagonist can get away, then, to some extent, with what Raskolnikov could not. Although The Guest does not entirely maintain his integrity, nor his sanity, he is able to hide his interiority and his “crime” from others, the reader, and himself. But he loses access to a higher plane that might offer him salvation. Although Vaim itself is posited as a place of escape for The Guest, there is no real possibility of departure.

The Guest’s intentional effort to remove himself from society diverges from a modernist desire for religious seclusion or solitary transcendentalism in nature. Rather, Fosse’s character remains in a self-inflicted state of isolation and irrationality. Like István in David Szalay’s 2025 Booker Prize recipient, Flesh, The Guest experiences things as they happen to him. Both characters are colored by an implicit alienation they are at least partially unaware of, and seem to teeter around a conversation about men who are alone and are either psychologically or literally removed from mainstream society. 

The anonymity The Guest seeks isn’t granted to him, and when, at the end of the novel, he makes friends with The Sailor and they go on his boat together, he is lost at sea under mysterious circumstances. This is also how Fosse plays with the absence of God in Vaim Hotel. Just when The Guest makes friends with The Sailor, he dies. My feeling is that Fosse might think that’s funny. Then, escape is futile; the world continues to recognize you. The Guest came to Vaim (although again, we don’t really know why) to seek some kind of freedom in isolation. Raskolnikov, too, isolates himself to create a perfect rational theory; his physical and spiritual separation from others alters his moral compass, which drives him to murder. Isolation is self-destructive for Dostoyevsky, and a spiritual dead-end, much like the town of Vaim. To be saved, Rodya relates intimately with others - specifically, through a relationship with a “good” woman. Notably, the only named character in Fosse’s novel is a woman, Brita.

Through Vaim Hotel, Fosse asks a timely question about solitude and its consequences with a comic edge. Everyone in Vaim is ‘alone together.’ Vaim and its residents are bereft of both past and future, and more so, of life and death, solidifying Fosse’s avoidance of all things divine in the novel. Whether as an incel, monk, or poet, the protagonist lacks affiliation to even the hyper-isolated town of Vaim; he is only a nameless guest. L’Étranger. But Fosse’s character is an insight into a distinct, contemporary alienation; The Guest, unlike Meursault, István, or Rodya, does not reveal what has prompted his desire for isolation, so the reader cannot decide whether it is morally viable. But despite his privatised past, Fosse manages to create a protagonist who still elicits sympathy. He offers an alternative consideration of someone like the incel. Rather than asking ‘why?’, or searching for an explanation, Vaim Hotel is sympathetic to the desire for anonymity, for non-disclosure, for beatitude. As Fosse reminds us, ‘the world is a hard place to be.’ Art by Honor Giles