This spring, I asked my students to read twelve paragraphs, which, when put like that, just the twelve paragraphs, sounds quite doable, maybe even makes me seem too relaxed—though there was other work to be done, writing a novel for example—but as for reading, the literature component of the course, that was it, twelve paragraphs, so they bought the book, Satantango (1985) by Lázsló Krasznahorkai, gave their $16.95 to New Directions, and I said something like, please read the first paragraph over the weekend, and I always wonder why I say "please" to my students, how that word functions pedagogically in an environment increasingly kowtowing to customer experience, and maybe some of them started to do that reading right away, and maybe some of the others waited until the last minute (which, seeing as the average adult reads 200 to 250 wpm, is a reasonable amount of time to metabolize your typical paragraph), but regardless of how much time they afforded themselves, they soon discovered, some of them just moments before class began at 2:20 p.m. in the basement of the Riles Building at Northern Arizona University, that the first paragraph begins on page 3 and ends on page 21, nary an indentation for 19 pages, which haha, okay then, good joke (or not really), I mean, it's the same joke that some postmodern writer perpetrates every other year or so since James Joyce's Finnegans Wake tumbled forth, except this time, to me at least, it felt different, some would say earned (which is a word I've tired of in writing criticism), the way Krasznahorkai (a Hungarian writer, who won the Nobel Prize in 2025, ostensibly for this book) conceives of each chapter as a single paragraph, which is to say each paragraph as a sustained moment in the town's psyche, but it's more complex than that, as the twelve chapters ascend (I-VI) and then descend (VI-I), or more like VI'-I', like a variation on the tango itself, which is a dance whose footwork usually involves distinct moments that move toward and distinct moments that move away, and yes, that's exactly what happens in the book as the first six chapters are defined by the quasi-satanic figure of Irimiás moving toward the inhabitants of a decaying estate (only officially arriving in the very last sentence of part one) while the second six chapters are defined by those same inhabitants dispersing to outposts of the state (after investing all their money and hope in Irimiás), which is another way of saying the first part of the book is defined by the togetherness of this motley cast of characters and the second half is defined by their pulling apart, their utter isolation after being hoodwinked / defrauded / duped / bamboozled / deceived, we presume, so it's fair (if not quite accurate) when critics have called the book nihilistic, and while the book has these exquisitely granular moments—so many emptied bottles of the Hungarian brandy known as pálinka, so many magical spiders who spin intricate webs across the moldering ceiling beams of the local watering hole, and so much speculation about the levitating corpse of a young girl, Esti Horgos, who died in a devastating murder-suicide with her dog, and who is perhaps the most tragic character I've ever encountered in modern literature (and this includes Macabéa from Clarice Lispector's The Hour of the Star)—it's really the structure that captivated me, a captivation that only deepened as I watched Béla Tarr's 7.5-hour film adaptation of Satantango, mostly comprised of long takes, and which Tarr claimed was made up of just 150 shots in total, and I got to wondering, what about those single-sentence novels everyone keeps talking about, and which I'd only until now regarded as a gimmick, I mean, sure there are fantastic single-sentence stories out there, like those highlighted in Jason Thayer's journal Complete Sentence, but when it comes to the novel form, isn't that when the experiment is bound to fail (and not in a good way?), a parade of clauses performing merciless chest compressions on the sentence, trying to keep alive a thing that wants to die, was designed to die, and what is it with authors (myself included) who won't let sentences die their insignificant deaths, and when did the sentence become so arrogant as to imagine itself immortal, and when did the comma start cosplaying as a period, yes, isn't it the comma who's the culprit of the crazy daisy-chain of broken syntaxes, well, it's hard to say, and every time I go looking for an entry point into one of these single-sentence novels, I end up in the same claustrophobic corners, being told I should try Énard's or Ellmann's or Andrzejewski's or Hrabal's or, damn if it isn't Krasznahorkai again, but no, they're not for me I decided, I don't think, no thank you, and it's because of my studied aversion (no, not intimidation) to even the idea of single-sentence book that I found myself surprised to be reading one unknowingly, and didn't I feel like one of my students as I began reading Jon Fosse's Septology, which is a "book" comprised of three "books," which are themselves comprised of two, three, and two "books," respectively (i.e., Septology I-VII: The Other Name (I-II), I Is Another (III-V), A New Name (V-VII)), yes, I felt like a trick had been played on me, and nobody said please this time, because hadn't I been recommended this book from multiple literary listicles, and hadn't I read the description, something like, this is a book about a Norwegian painter named Asle and his namesake doppelgänger (also a painter, but alcoholic), a book about the one Asle saving the other Asle, which in some Freudian sense must be a form of saving oneself, but never did the listicles mention that the 672-page book(s) was composed in a single sentence, and I hadn't even noticed it myself, I don't know why, until I was about ten pages in, and somebody in my house said, Dad, it's time to go, and I said okay, once I'm finished with this paragraph, and I kept reading, and minutes later, that same somebody said, Really dad—we need to leave, and I said yes, just let me finish this sentence at least, and I scanned ahead, looking for the next period or paragraph break, only to find there was none, not on this page or the next one, just one solid block of prose, verso and recto, verso and recto, verso and recto, verso and recto, a vertigo of words, the only indentations occurring for dialogue, which themselves are sound bites nested within the prose's greater stream, and so I read a few more lines of the novel, feeling my heart racing a little bit as I realized I would have to sit here for at least an eight-hour reading shift before I could possibly finish the novel's only sentence, and that somebody who was trying to get me to put the book down—okay, it was my daughter Greta—I flat-out asked her to look at the page, and did she see any funny business going on here—because, yes, even the seven individual books within this novel have no terminus, and even a six-year-old knows that a period, paragraph, and (at the very least) book ought to end with a period, am I wrong, and I should note that, despite the lack of punctuation, there's a pleasant predictability to the beginnings and ends of the books in this book, as each begins with Asle painting and ends with him praying in Latin—e.g., book one ends with Asle in bed, praying "…in hora morta nostræ…" and book two begins with "…and I see myself standing…" at canvas—the book obeying the character's daily rituals over the course of a week, and as soon as I learned that each book spans a day (so therefore, Septology spans one full week), I resolved to read at that same pace, and I quickly found myself uncertain about what Fosse stands for, because had I heard wrong when my playwright friend used the phrase "Fosse minimalism,"—yes, who is Fosse (besides, I should mention, also a winner of the Nobel Prize, 2023)—but the more I entered the novel, I realized his penchant for minimalism was remarkably intact here, making this, what, the most maximal version of minimalism, "min-maxxing" as it were, or more to the point, conceptually maximal but with minimalist prose, and there's a number of tricks he uses to keep the prose flowing, one of which is the frequent (but not off-putting) insertion of the phrase "I think" where he could have just as easily put a period, and it's almost like Fosse is making a declaration about what a sentence even is, the way he replaces the period with "I think," and indeed, there are as many usages of "I think" in this novel as there should be periods, as if thinking and punctuating are coextensive acts, which is a trick I've heard Lucy Ellmann also avails herself of in her single-sentence novel, Ducks, Newburyport, except her go-to phrase is "the fact that," which Wikipedia claims is used over 19,000 times in that novel,and another of Fosse's tricks is his "recursive style," as they say, the way an image or idea is introduced and then reintroduced and then re-reintroduced with little to no variation, each iteration reproduced verbatim, capturing Asle's niggling doubts or worries as they manifest throughout his days, and so it goes with the hallucination he has of two young lovers having public sex in the snow, possibly he and his late wife's doppelgängers, one generation removed, an image which strikes him each time he passes by the park, and whereas he will sometimes yield to its gravitational pull and perch above the park to watch and other times steels himself against the very notion, he will always acknowledge the existence of the thought, intrusive as it is, and always with the same words, more or less, always with the imagistic precision of an underrated genius painter, which is what the gallerist insists he is, and we see it again when he lets out the dog Bragi who pees yellow tunnels into the snow, the same shade of yellow each time, and we see it again as he mourns the death of his child sister, and we see it again when he refers to the "bald man" (a known pedophile), and we see it again when he chafes with his self-impressed neighbor Åsleik whose charming pedantry has, at least for Asle, lost its charm, and we see it again when he forgets or transposes the digits of Guro's house number—Guro, the eager interloper who claims to a dubious Asle that they've had sex many times, though he's skeptical about where any hanky-panky ever took place—and he notes his uncertainty about this number enough times that I forced myself to solve this mystery on his behalf, its knowability sent me rifling backwards through the book, asking what number did she herself utter in their first encounter, just so I could hold this answer in my head before his next questioning, and it's because of these beguiling tactics that the novel's freight becomes lighter over time, since it's not holding as many ideas as it seemed at the outset, no there are very few lines here, on this canvas, but many identical brushstrokes achieve these lines, each line getting thicker as Asle revisits the same tender areas of his life, and so it seems, to me at least, that Septology and Satantango, these Nobel novels are much bigger than the gimmick some might accuse them of being, because the gimmick is, according to cultural theorist Sianne Ngai, in part, a labor-saving device, and it's clear to me that neither Krasznahorkai nor Fosse expended less labor as a result of their compositional strategies, no, they undoubtedly labored more, and so require their readers to share in the labor—and isn't labor and laborless-ness a central theme of both books, come to think of it—and yes, that's probably how folks come to make declarations about a book and whether it has "earned" its conceits, earned its $16.95 and then some, and yes, that's probably why I say "please" to my students because I am not begging them to read, in general, as that's already implied by their voluntary enrollment in the course, is it not, but I am begging them, please, to come live inside this strange structure, which seems on the verge of collapse, yes, let us all call this page, this dense Krasznahorkai paragraph, this long and, well isn't it also lovely, Fosse sentence, our temporary estate/hus away from home.