This article is taken from the October 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
If it’s October, it must be Nobel Prize season, so how better to mark the occasion than with the new book by a Nobel literature laureate? Norwegian writer Jon Fosse took the prize in 2023, the third European to win since the chair of the literature committee had promised to make the award less Eurocentric four years earlier.
Fosse is a typical Nobel man in another sense: he writes in a high modernist style, his prose taking a circular path rather than a linear one. It repeats, reviews, interrogates, not so much nailing down a topic as pricking it with a thousand needles.
And it has no full stops, which sounds like a gimmick and, to some extent, is: the commas in his sentences do the work of full stops, and dialogue is still presented with line breaks. But it does a useful job of representing the way our minds drift from thought to thought without stopping. Fosse calls it “slow prose”, which would be a good opening for a joke about how his forename is a homophone for “yawn” — if he wasn’t so damned good.
Vaim is Fosse’s first novel since his Nobel win. As with his masterpiece Septology, it’s set in a timeless rural Norway, with a sparse cast of characters and is the first volume of a projected trilogy. At the centre of the story — to begin with — is narrator Jatgeir, whose opening lines will give you a sense of the style.
“So, I said, well here we are, I said and ran my fingers through my beard, my greying beard, I wasn’t young any more, no, but I wasn’t an old man either, it would probably be fair to say, yes, an ageing man, neither more nor less … ”
And so on. He qualifies and dissembles, but the story comes out. Jatgeir is a lonely man, who lives in the town of Vaim but travels regularly on his boat to Norway’s second largest city of Bjørgvin, to … well, he isn’t sure why he goes there. He goes because it’s something he used to look forward to and has now become a purpose in itself.
As Jatgeir fills us in on his life, he becomes a figure both comic and tragic. His only friend, Elias, no longer comes with him to Bjørgvin for reasons darkly hinted at. His boat is called Eline, after “the secret love of my youth”, and there’s a scene both touching and toe-curling when Jatgeir remembers the embarrassment of the real Eline discovering he had named his boat after her.
Worse still, strangers see him as an easy mark, and there are funny scenes delivered deadpan where he attempts to buy a needle and thread in a store and gets ripped off by the shop assistant — twice.
Then an unexpected act takes place. Eline, the secret love, comes to Jatgeir and asks for a trip on his boat. This is a small thing, but the background and the build-up and the repetitions of Fosse’s slow prose mean that, at the point where Eline takes Jatgeir’s hand to step onto the boat — the boat named after her — the effect is electric.
“How can she know when I have never said anything?” wonders Jatgeir, and he also asks himself, not unreasonably, whether this is really happening or if he is dreaming.
The subdued yet immersive style of Fosse’s writing means that this seems plausible for the reader, too.
But the surprises have only just begun. To say more would spoil, but, in the second and third parts of the book, we discover that Jatgeir is not necessarily the central character but that Eline may be instead. She is, according to the other narrators, all-powerful — yet she is their creation, since we never hear from her directly.
If this makes Vaim sound rather metafictonal, it is and it isn’t: Fosse is clearly exploring the ways we tell stories and how we record our experience of the world. There’s a sly self-referentiality too — one character taking five pages to decide whether he really did hear someone knock on his door is knowingly taking slow prose too far — but it’s really diving into the big stuff of life through these small lives.
When one character is shocked by news of a death, they reflect, Beckett-like, that “I think I probably can’t just stay standing there, I have to keep going, whatever that means, I think”. Later, another character says, “I’ve never come up with any explanation other than that everything was strange”. We can only agree and be glad.
We remain in Scandinavia for Finnish author Pirkko Saisio’s Lowest Common Denominator, which also sees the relaunch of the Penguin International Writers series. This series, which first ran in the 1980s and 1990s, gave us writers like Milan Kundera, Gabriel García Márquez and Haruki Murakami.
The accessible, even playful tone of those three is present in Saisio’s book — and could not be more different from Fosse. Here there is an exuberance that reflects the narrative voice of a child, fresh from 1950s Finland.
The voice is as charming as any good child narrative is, drawing on the tradition of truth from the mouths of babes. The narrator, seemingly Saisio herself, introduces her family members. “Father and Aunt Ulla don’t get along very well,” she tells us solemnly, “because Aunt Ulla once voted for a candidate from the centre-right National Coalition Party simply for his beautiful brown eyes.”
Or “Talking in bed is difficult because Grandma and Grandpa’s dentures are soaking side by side on the dresser in the kitchen, and it’s a little hard to understand what they’re saying.”
But the key to the unique flavour of this book is the way Saisio splits the narrative, switching from an immediate first person to a more distant third, often mid-sentence. And so the voice telescopes in and out, bringing us into the young Saisio’s experiences, then zooming out for contextual insight. The child sees this as her writing her own story: “Now I have a secret. It’s a gate I can open whenever I want to escape. [ … ] Behind the gate, I’m not a child but an adult. Behind the gate, I’m a writer.”
Her childhood is typically universal, typically unique. She is surrounded by eccentric relatives, such as the aunt and uncle who married twice and divorced twice. She loves her beautiful blonde friend Helena, wants to be her, but “I’m forced to be small and bad and dark-haired”. The shelves at home are stuffed with books, and “the books all have the same name: Collected Works”. The authors are V.I. Lenin and Joseph Stalin, and Saisio’s mother hides them under a pile of coats when visitors come.
Saisio, we learn, lives in a world of order and absolutes — she is told she must love her family and God and her country: “Love is an order and an obligation.” But certainty is on the way out: childhood passes, she works in the family shop and her father dies. Like Vaim, this is the first book in a trilogy, and it became a bestseller in Finland. You can see why. Saisio at one point, slipping once again into the third person, says that “she was moved by her own words (a trap she constantly falls into throughout her life)”. The reader will be too.
This month marks the centenary of the birth of American novelist Elmore Leonard, described by Martin Amis as “a literary genius who writes re-readable thrillers”. He’s best known for his crime novels, and Penguin has reissued a clutch of them so we can reacquaint ourselves with his brilliance.
City Primeval (1980) is one of the best. It takes us to Detroit where crooked judge Alvin Guy (“Sgt Robinson was quite surprised and chagrined to hear a judge boasting of his sexual participation with a former criminal defendant”) is about to receive the ultimate punishment. He is taking a ride in his car with a young woman when he’s seen by a man named Clement Mansell, who judges him “a jig with a white girl” with “a little fag mustache”.
Mansell takes umbrage at this and pursues Guy’s car, crashes into it and shoots him. “He didn’t look Cuban now; he didn’t look like anything.” When the girl starts screaming, Mansell shoots her too. He is, it turns out, a dangerous psychopath who escaped custody on a technicality, and it is characteristic of Leonard’s world that Guy’s murder was random rather than a judgement on his wrongdoing.
Still, there is one support to cling to: Raymond Cruz, homicide detective who doesn’t realise it was a random killing. When he looks for a motive, a colleague says, “Put down about twenty-six hundred names right there. Anybody even knew the prick, it’s gone through their mind.”
So the race is on, with a cast of good cops, bad cops (“You don’t [make a statement], then I take you down the garage, stand you against the wall and beat the shit out of you with the front end of a squad car”), sneaky lawyers and tortured Albanians. Everything Leonard writes has a buzz about it, and he never lets a scene go to waste, even when he’s just introducing new characters.
City Primeval shows a crooked world of immoral people, and Leonard portrays it with a sort of cheerful neutrality. There is no authorial hand-holding here — except the desire to entertain the reader at all times.
