The Path to Jon Fosse's 'Septology'

Innumerable nothings happen in the dim, watery fjord lands of Jon Fosse’s novels and plays. In the novella Aliss at the Fire, a woman named Signe lies on a bench and remembers (or hallucinates) her husband Asle, who disappeared one night two decades earlier, after announcing he would head out onto the fjord. In Fosse’s magnum opus, Septology, a widowed painter, also named Asle, spends hundreds of pages thinking about his wife, his doppelgänger, his neighbor and the painting he can’t seem to rid himself of. Almost nothing occurs. And everything that does, recurs.