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A powerful, surreal novel, in the tradition of Gogol, about the chaotic events surrounding the arrival of a circus in a small Hungarian town.The Melancholy of Resistance, László Krasznahorkai's magisterial, surreal novel, depicts a chain of mysterious events in a small Hungarian town. A circus, promising to display the stuffed body of the largest whale in the world, arrives in the dead of winter, prompting bizarre rumors. Word spreads that the circus folk have a sinister purpose in mind, and the frightened citizens cling to any manifestation of order they can find music, cosmology, fascism. The novel's characters are unforgettable: the evil Mrs. Eszter,plotting her takeover of the town; her weakling husband; and Valuska, our hapless hero with his head in the clouds, who is the tender center of the book, the only pure and noble soul to be found. Compact, powerful and intense,The Melancholy of Resistance, as its enormously gifted translator George Szirtes puts it, "is a slow lava flow of narrative, a vast black river of type." And yet, miraculously, the novel, in the words ofThe Guardian, "lifts the reader along in lunar leaps and bounds."… (more)
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"To be wise, however, soberly to anticipate what might lie in store, was truly no easy task, for it was as is some vital yet
But the problem with the book is also contained in this sentence, which occurs just one page into the book. The first third of the book builds a dense atmosphere of uncertainty, as we are introduced at first to a very common stereotype of a paranoid haute-bourgeois woman whose main pleasure is her hermetically sealed apartment and whose main fear is mainly being stared at in trains, but then to increasingly unprecedented characters who don't seem to follow any clear models -- a young man who cares only for the heavens, and senses only the sublime, but isn't a poet and can't articulate much of what he feels, and who runs randomly through the town like Wozzeck; and a reclusive, self-deluding retired music teacher who has increasingly unpersuasive gems of unhelpfully abstract wisdom based on a threadbare nihilism he derived, improbably, from the study of equal temperament -- and we follow those very different sorts of characters, who would normally occupy different books (the woman would be in a social satire; the ineloquent young man in a sequel to "Wozzeck," the decrepit sage to some draft by Beckett) as they move through a small Hungarian town that is prone to a series of apparently unrelated, sometimes meaningless events (a tree falls, at first diagonally onto a building across the street; people in the distance may or may not be beating someone; it hasn't snowed for a long time; cats are increasingly feral; someone may or may not be following someone else); the whole flows along in a paragraphless prose that the translator describes as "a slow lava flow of narrative."
All that is wonderful, and reminded me of Buechner, Gogol, Kafka, Musil, Canetti, and above all Bernhard. It wanders in intention and in meaning, just as its characters wander back and forth, and so I can also see why Sebald liked it. But then everything begins to turn on a mysterious "prince" (who is really some sort of circus freak; he initially came to down inside an enormous metal trailer that also held a stuffed whale) whose followers embody a kind of meaningless desire for destruction or limitless action that has echoes of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and later nihilisms and anarchisms.
Why is that disappointing? Because Beckett and Bernhard both demonstrated that it's moral, ethical, eschatological uncertainty that counts, and not the plot devices that drive that uncertainty, and certainly not whatever flimsy "explanations" there might be for the uncertainty. The sentence I quoted, together with the unaccountably blurred characters, are parts of a fictional imagination that is much more dangerous and fascinating than the Ray Bradbury-esque evil "prince of darkness" and his inexplicably demented followers. The world Krasznahorkai conjures at the beginning is so much darker than the one he eventually explains away with the paraphernalia of a circus. The lesson of Beckett and Bernhard would seem to be easy to learn, especially for someone like Krasznahorkai who has so clearly experienced many varieties of nameless unease, but for some reason authors like Krasznahorkai, and so many others all the way to Bradbury and King, keep feeling they need the machinery of a plot, the comfort of explanations. I does not help at all that the "prince" remains mysterious. He ruins the book simply by appearing in it. The title of Krazhnahorkai's newly translated book, "War and War," promises better: but then again so does "The Melancholy of Resistance," which could more accurately have been called "The Prince of Darkness and the Whale."
On the other hand, the last pages of the book are stupendous. They are an extended allegory of the dissolution of the world, couched as a forensic report on the decay of a corpse -- the same haute-bourgeois woman who opened the novel. It is a spectacular ending, as unexpected in its literal anatomizing as the end of "Jules and Jim."
Valuska demonstrates the motion of the planets with his fellow drinkers, and there is this stunning realization that he does this often, and that all the patrons, drunk beasts too rough to slouch towards anywhere, all know their part in this celestial drama. They curse and take their places around the Sun. They become happy in their orbits. And when the solar system breaks up, they return to their seats.
But there are no paragraph breaks. I thought I would be okay with this. It's like eating late lobster without a hammer. Egad, have I had to work for these lovely morsels. I work and work and work. I can't taste the story anymore or distinguish the characters. The writing has that slightly flattened aspect that comes with some translations, so I don't have the joys of language to keep me at it, and unfortunately, I'm not really an ideas person. I read for those moments of flying around the sun; me, my shelves, and last night's cabbage in the air, around and around.
I used to be able to shell a lobster with my bare hands. Can still do it for August season when they've shed their old homes. There are many pressure points.
I'm only 56. Am I really reaching the point where I begin that slide where things like paragraph breaks, mise en page, occasional writerly self-indulgence, make me unable to go on with a book? Is that day coming when I can't eat lobster anymore because I can't break the shells?
I am so exhausted by this book. I wish the village had one of those dark penny Riesling bars. I would settle in with a tall glass, a plate of cabbage, and a fried egg staring back at me like a little sun from the top of a piece of skirt steak.
All this, and I forget to mention the whale.
Am I glad that I read this? Yes. Do I know why? I think so. Do I understand it? On some levels, but I believe that this story would reveal new nuances with multiple readings. Do I think highly of the writing? Absolutely brilliant!
Easily the best book I've read in the last six months.