In Kjell Askildsen’s story "The Clothes Got So Small," a father sits in his son’s house, waiting. He has come to visit. The son is elsewhere—out, or upstairs, the story does not say. The father moves through rooms, examines objects, sits down, stands up. A woman who may be the son’s wife offers coffee. The father accepts. The coffee is poured. The conversation is brief and almost entirely without content. At some point, the father notices that the clothes in the house have gotten small. This is not a revelation. It is an observation, placed in the prose with the same weight as every other observation. The story ends, or rather it stops, without having begun in any conventional sense.
Seán Kinsella’s English translation, published by Dalkey Archive in 2022 in the collection Everything Like Before, renders this stasis with a fidelity that deserves close attention. The Norwegian original’s flat, declarative sentences—short, unadorned, refusing hierarchy of information—find in Kinsella’s English a corresponding plainness. "He sat down in the chair. It was a good chair." The translation does not reach for significance where the original refuses it. This is harder than it sounds. The temptation when translating a text where nothing happens is to supply, through rhythm or word choice, a hint of drama the author deliberately withheld. Kinsella does not. The chair is a good chair. That is all.
I have been thinking about this story for several weeks, and about the difficulty of writing about books that refuse to explain themselves. Not books that are obscure or deliberately difficult in the manner of high modernism—Askildsen is not writing in that tradition—but books that simply decline to provide the narrative architecture readers have been trained to expect. Something occurs, or more precisely, someone is present in a room, and then the prose leaves. The reader is given no resolution because there is no conflict to resolve, no climax because there is no rising action, no epiphany because the characters do not arrive at understanding. What the reader is given is a slice of duration, rendered with such precision that the precision itself becomes the substance.
The Norwegian Art of Not Happening
Askildsen, who died in 2021 at the age of ninety-one, is often described in Norwegian literary criticism as a master of the short story. The designation is accurate but tells an Anglophone reader almost nothing about what kind of mastery is at work. His stories are short—some run to only three or four pages—but their brevity is not a function of compression in the way we typically mean when we call a writer economical. There is no sense that a longer narrative has been distilled to its essence. Rather, the stories seem to have been written at the exact length of the attention they require, which is the length of the event they contain, which is often the length of someone sitting in a room and then leaving it.
In "The Clothes Got So Small," the father’s visit has no narrative purpose. He does not come to deliver news, to confront, to reconcile. He comes because visiting is what fathers do, and the story observes the visit the way one might observe weather: with attention but without expectation. When the observation about the clothes arrives—small clothes, children’s clothes perhaps, or simply the clothes of a household that has shifted around the father’s absence—it does not function as symbol or metaphor. It functions as perception. The father notices something. The prose records it. The story moves on, or rather, the story ends.
This is not the same as the slice-of-life realism that Anglophone fiction has long practiced. In the American short-story tradition from Chekhov through Carver and beyond, stories without dramatic incident still typically operate on an architecture of implied significance. A moment is chosen because it crystallizes something—a relationship, a failure, a shift in understanding. The writer may not state the significance, but the selection of the moment implies it. Askildsen’s stories refuse even this. The moment is not chosen because it crystallizes. It is chosen because it occurred, or because the prose arrived at it, and the reader’s task is not to decode significance but to accept the terms of the observation.
Dag Solstad’s shortest works operate in a related but distinct register. Solstad, whose novels have been translated into English by Sverre Lyngstad and more recently by others, is best known to Anglophone readers for longer works like Shyness and Dignity (translated by Lyngstad, New Directions, 2006) and Telemachus (translated by Lyngstad, New Directions, 2015). But his briefest prose—particularly the short novels and novellas that constitute a significant portion of his output—performs a similar refusal of plot, though with a different tonal quality. Where Askildsen’s prose is austere and external, Solstad’s is internal and recursive, circling the same observations from within a single consciousness until the observation has been worn smooth by repetition.
In Armand V.: Footnotes to an Unread Book (translated by Sverre Lyngstad, New Directions, 2012), Solstad constructs an entire novel from material that is, by the narrator’s own account, supplementary to a book that does not exist. The footnotes refer to an unread text, and the reader is given only the apparatus, never the thing itself. What occurs in the footnotes is minimal: a man reflects on his friendship with another man, on the political commitments they once shared, on the distance that has grown between them. The reflection is repetitive, almost obsessive, and the novel’s movement is not forward but lateral, shifting by degrees across the same terrain.
Lyngstad’s translation faces a particular challenge here: maintaining the reader’s engagement across a novel that explicitly tells its reader the important material is elsewhere. The translation must carry the irony without underlining it, must preserve Solstad’s long, clause-laden sentences without making them feel ponderous in English, and must render the recursive structure without flattening it into tedium. That Lyngstad succeeds is a testament to a translator’s capacity for what I can only call tonal endurance—the ability to sustain a note across hundreds of pages without letting it waver.
What Anti-Plot Refuses
The term anti-plot is borrowed from drama theory, where it describes narratives that subvert or invert conventional dramatic structure. I use it here with some hesitation, because the prefix implies opposition, and what Askildsen and Solstad do is not oppose plot so much as decline to participate in its assumptions. Their fiction does not argue against narrative architecture. It simply builds elsewhere.
What it declines, specifically, is the expectation that fiction is primarily about events that change characters, that the change constitutes the story’s meaning, and that the reader’s satisfaction depends on perceiving the change. This is the expectation that a standard AI plot generator makes visible by encoding it as a set of parameters: a protagonist who wants something, an obstruction that prevents the want, stakes that make the outcome matter, and a structure—three-act, five-act, Save the Cat, Hero’s Journey—that arranges these elements into a satisfying shape. The Reedsy plot generator, for instance, explicitly instructs users to define a core conflict, establish what is at stake, and select a story structure, treating these as the irreducible components of narrative. The tool’s assumptions are clear and, for many kinds of fiction, entirely reasonable. But they are assumptions, not laws, and anti-plot fiction reminds us of this by refusing every one of them.
That same discipline applies to narrative structure: before publishing, editors need a way to test events, claims, and consequences actually follow one another, which is where an AI plot generator that fits the project can function as a planning aid rather than a substitute for domain evidence.
Askildsen’s father does not want anything. There is no obstruction because there is no desire to obstruct. The stakes are personal only in the sense that all human presence has stakes—the father is present in his son’s house, and that presence carries its own weight—but the story does not frame this weight as a conflict to be resolved. Solstad’s Armand does want something—understanding, perhaps, or the recovery of a friendship—but the novel does not build toward the satisfaction or frustration of that want. It builds, instead, toward the contemplation of the want itself, which is a different activity entirely.
The broader professional conversation about what automated tools can and cannot replicate in literary craft is ongoing, and the Authors Guild’s guidance on AI best practices rightly emphasizes the value of original human voice and the thinking that goes into writing as distinct from what tools produce. What interests me here is not the question of whether tools can generate anti-plot fiction—they cannot, because anti-plot requires the deliberate refusal of the very structures such tools are built to produce—but what the existence of these tools reveals about the default expectations readers and writers bring to narrative. The plot generator’s parameters are a map of what we collectively consider a story to be. Anti-plot fiction is the territory outside that map.
The Translator’s Challenge: Tension Without Event
Translating fiction that refuses plot presents a particular set of problems that go beyond the usual challenges of literary translation. In a conventional narrative, the translator can rely on the source text’s dramatic architecture to carry the reader forward. The plot provides momentum. Even when individual sentences are difficult, the reader’s desire to know what happens next supplies a forward pull that the translator can trust. In Askildsen and Solstad, this pull does not exist. The translator must generate and sustain tension through means that are entirely textual: rhythm, word choice, the placement of commas, the length of paragraphs.
Kinsella’s translation of "The Clothes Got So Small" demonstrates this with particular clarity. Consider the passage in which the father moves through the son’s house:
He went into the living room. There was a couch and two armchairs. On the table were some magazines. He looked at the magazines. He did not pick them up. He went back to the kitchen.
In Norwegian, the prose’s rhythm carries a quality I can only describe as observational patience—the sentences observe the father observing the room, and the rhythm of the sentences mirrors the rhythm of the looking. In English, this rhythm is harder to achieve because English prose tends toward subordination and connection, toward telling the reader how one sentence relates to the next. Kinsella’s translation resists this tendency. The sentences remain coordinate, each one a separate act of perception, connected only by the father’s presence. The result is English prose that reads as if it were thinking in Norwegian, which is precisely what the best translation of this kind of fiction must do.
The difficulty is that this approach risks losing the Anglophone reader, who may interpret the flatness as clumsiness rather than craft. A reader trained on the implicit significance of the Carver tradition may read Kinsella’s translation and feel that something is missing—that the translation has failed to capture a depth that must surely be present in the original. In my experience, the depth is present, but it is not the kind that lives in individual sentences. It lives in the accumulation of sentences, in the way the story’s refusal to escalate creates a pressure that builds not toward climax but toward a kind of attention. The translator must trust that this pressure will survive the crossing from one language to another, and the reader must trust that the translator has not lost it in transit.
Solstad’s translators face a different but related challenge. Solstad’s sentences are long where Askildsen’s are short, and their tension comes not from the flatness of individual observations but from the recursive pressure of a consciousness returning to the same material. Lyngstad’s translations of Solstad preserve this pressure by maintaining the sentence structure even when English syntax resists it. The result is English that sometimes feels overlong, that seems to pile clauses beyond the reader’s patience, but this feeling is the point. Solstad’s prose is meant to test the reader’s tolerance for staying with a thought, and the translation must test that tolerance rather than relieve it.
Reading Without Expectation
I have been asked, by readers of this blog and by students in the translation workshops I occasionally teach, how one reviews a book that refuses to explain itself. The question is usually practical: what do you say about a novel in which nothing happens? The implication is that the reviewer’s task is to identify and communicate the book’s meaning, and that a book without discernible meaning presents a problem of critical method.
I do not think this is the problem. The problem, rather, is that we have come to expect meaning to arrive in a particular shape—shaped like a plot, with a beginning that establishes desire, a middle that frustrates it, and an end that resolves or permanently defers the frustration. When meaning arrives in a different shape—shaped like attention, or duration, or the gradual accumulation of perceptual detail—we are tempted to say that meaning has not arrived at all.
Askildsen’s stories have meaning, but it is the meaning of a held gaze rather than a pursued goal. When the father in "The Clothes Got So Small" notices the small clothes, the meaning is not in the observation itself but in the quality of attention that makes the observation possible. The father is looking at his son’s life with the careful, unjudging attention of someone who knows he does not belong there but who is present nonetheless. The story’s meaning is this attention, and it cannot be extracted from the prose and restated as a thesis because the attention exists only in the prose’s specific arrangement of sentences.
Solstad’s meaning is similarly resistant to extraction. Armand V. is about friendship and political disappointment, but it is about these things in the way that a long conversation with a friend is about them: not by arriving at conclusions but by dwelling in the material, by turning it over, by returning to it from different angles until the angles themselves become the substance. The novel’s meaning is in the dwelling, not in what the dwelling produces.
Reviewing such books requires a critical method that does not depend on plot summary, because there is nothing to summarize, and that does not depend on identifying the book’s argument, because the book is not making an argument in the conventional sense. It requires, instead, the kind of close attention that the books themselves model: attention to sentence rhythm, to the placement of paragraphs, to the way white space functions on the page, to the specific words a translator chooses and the words they might have chosen but did not. It requires, in other words, reading the way Askildsen’s father looks at the living room: with patience, without expectation, and with a willingness to find the observation sufficient.
The Shelf of Books That Refuse
On the shelf above my desk in Helsinki, I keep a small section of books that have resisted my attempts to review them. Some of these are books I have lived with for years, returning to them seasonally, reading a few pages at a time, waiting for the critical language that will let me write about them without reducing them. Askildsen’s Everything Like Before is on this shelf. So is Solstad’s Armand V. So are several books by Merethe Lindstrøm, whose prose operates in a register of atmospheric indirection I have written about elsewhere but never to my own satisfaction. So is a water-stained copy of a Faroese novel I found in a Tromsø secondhand shop, which I cannot read in the original and which exists in no English translation, but which I keep because its physical presence on the shelf reminds me that some literature remains outside the critical apparatus entirely.
I do not think this shelf represents a failure of criticism. I think it represents a recognition that some books require a different kind of attention than the review cycle allows. The review cycle, with its deadlines and its demand for timely response, is built on the assumption that a book can be read, understood, and assessed within a few weeks. This assumption works for books that operate on conventional narrative architecture, because the architecture itself accelerates understanding—the plot tells you what the book is about, and the reviewer’s task is to evaluate how well the book is about it. For books that refuse this architecture, the timeline is wrong. Understanding arrives not through the acceleration of plot but through the slow accumulation of rereading, and the review that comes too early will miss the meaning because the meaning has not yet had time to surface.
This is why I no longer review books in their publication month, and why I have come to believe that the practice of reading itself—the slow, repeatable, contemplative practice that this blog has always championed—is the only adequate response to fiction that refuses to explain itself. Not because such fiction is difficult in the way that dense modernist prose is difficult, but because it asks the reader to relinquish the expectation that fiction will provide, and to accept in its place the slower, less certain reward of being present with a text that does not know what it is about and does not pretend to.
Askildsen’s father, sitting in the chair that is a good chair, does not know what his visit is about. He is there because he came. The story is there because it was written. The translation is there because a translator decided that this particular arrangement of sentences deserved to exist in another language. And the reader is there because they chose to stay with a text that offered them nothing but its own attention. That, I have come to believe, is enough.