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Amsterdam Wereldbibliotheek © 2016
User reviews
LibraryThing member JimElkins
It's just not possible not to read a book that is endorsed by W.G. Sebald and Susan Sontag, and whose author -- and his amazing translator -- can write sentences like this:
"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."
"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
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undetectable modification had taken place in the eternally stable composition of the air, in the very remoteness of that hitherto faultless mechanism or unnamed principle -- which, it is often remarked, makes the world go round and of which the most imposing evidence is the sheer phenomenon of the world's existence -- which had suddenly lost some of its power, and it was because of this that the troubling knowledge of the probability of danger was in fact less unbearable than the common sense of foreboding that soon anything at all might happen and that this 'anything' -- the law governing its likelihood becoming less apparent in the process of disintegration -- was leading to greater anxiety than the thought of any personal misfortune, thereby increasingly depriving people of the possibility of coolly appraising the facts." 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."
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LibraryThing member dmarsh451
There are moments of astounding beauty in this book. My personal favourite is when Valuska,the book's holy fool, demonstrates the motion of the planets around the sun in the kind of bar only found only in Hungarian and Slav lit, 'the penny Riesling in their scratch-marked glasses...'. Dark bars
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.
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they are, where tables rock on their uneven legs and pickling spices permeate the walls. I think I read this stuff for those bars. 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.
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LibraryThing member byebyelibrary
Susan Sontag compared this mystifying, inspiring, tiring, hilarious, disturbing book as worthy of comparisons to Gogol and Melville. Can't quibble with that. I thought more of the lines of the mutant offspring of Faulkner and Bulgakov. The book in its filibuster, paragraph-less seems like a
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modernist masterwork, put then Krasznahorkai, as if to spit on his own genius, takes a jarring post-modern turn with the final few pages in which he kills the reader. This is a book that will never let you cling to any emotion or thought. Moments after a guffaw someone will get raped and murdered. The story is not told in live actions but rather like a play (Eugene O'Neill meets Moliere) things happen offstage and the characters try to make sense of them in flawed retellings to other characters. This is a book of a half dozen semi-reliable narrations. It is a rare book that produces in the reader a state akin to that of the characters: disquiet, confusion, loss of faith, loss of balance, and, then, in the last few pages, loss of life. Show Less
LibraryThing member BayardUS
This book creates a tone unlike any other that I've read, and features a unique setting and an interesting cast of characters. I can't explain why I like it, in fact I'm not sure why I like it so much myself, but nevertheless I do.
LibraryThing member hemlokgang
This is a very difficult review to write. This was one of densest books I have ever read. The basic story of anarchy in a Hungarian city which is capitalized upon by a brutal, power hungry, opportunistic woman, is told in a Kafkaesque and fairly abstruse manner. The characters are quite memorable,
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!
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including, the reclusive professor, his opportunistic wife, and their humble and honorable minion. The story's trajectory occurs painfully slowly at first and then seems to proceed in leaps and bounds. 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!
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LibraryThing member Steve38
A curious book chosen as holiday reading. A Hungarian author for a visit to Budapest. In the end completed long after returning home. Skimmed through. Skimming seeming and appropriate pace for a book written with no paragraph breaks and few chapters. Page after page of unbroken close type. Strange
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how presentation affects perception. No thought of lingering just a romp to the end. Which seemed to suit the pace of the narrative which shifted between mundane realism and strolling surealism. Did I learn anything about Hungary? Yes, it's still the same obvious puzzle that it has always been. Show Less
LibraryThing member maiamaia
The giant whale exhibited by the circus is Hobbes' Leviathan, and you'd get more out of this book if you read up on that first. I hadn't. I had the feeling it somehow concerned Hungarian history too. He hates both his female characters and sets them up for sexual sticky ends, so misogynist, but
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only unconsciously. Hypnotically written, but very dense, so you feel like you are diving deep and drowning at the same time. Do not worry if you find the prose heavy going at first, you will be gripped. Not very like any other novel, and worth reading, but I lost so much by not knowing the ideas it was referring too. Show Less
LibraryThing member William345
I was really enjoying this. The prose is a little dense, and there's no question that the author has a penchant for abstraction, as seen in the musings of the musicologist; but there is also wry humor and elegant surrealism, deftly handled. The opening sequence of the elderly Mrs. Plauf going into
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hysterics on the train is hilarious. As we move from character (Mrs Eszter) to character (Valushka), the story deepens. We see, or feel we do, their every ratiocination. I don't want to give away the fun so I'll just say that in a trice the story turns from an almost lighthearted tale to one in which we have to wonder if we aren't heading for a meeting with our maker, or ultimate darkness, or enlightenment. Call it what you will. The setting is Budapest but you only know that through mention of various landmarks. The city itself is never named. Then at about page 200 we hit this turgid wall of philosophical musing, by the musicologist again, and it stops us dead; and try as we might, we cannot, even after successive tries, move beyond it. We long for the joys of narrative pleasure. What makes a writer think he or she can abandon the reader even for a moment? A friend here on GR has a shelf called "seduced and abandoned." Thus I file this one. Recommended with reservations. Show Less
LibraryThing member Cartoom
This book is rare in that it has as its basic theme or the core idea growing from the the inevitable fact that everything in 'the real world' over time will succumb to the entropic decay; a physical baseline none of us can escape: Everything including ourselves will eventually break down, vanish
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and be forgotten. The sinister forces in the story promotes the idea of 'chaos' (a circus with a dead whale arrives and with comes uprest and a rising chaos in the city) )and along the unfolding of the narrative people are estranged and alienated, not really understanding the forces at work. Only few persons has a grasp of these forces and uses that knowledge in a power play that leaves no room for being human - you either play or are being played. The composition of the story is itself exemplifying the entropic decay because in the end the story 'dies' and leaves the reader in a - yes - melancholy mood. The tale is cynical and unrelenting in showing there is no hope, but I guess you could draw the positive conclusion that decay and chaos only benefits those (in the short run) who strive for power and thus we should all fight the decay and chaos around us and seek to understand the world as it is, even when that's not possible. Show Less
LibraryThing member stillatim
I'm starting to think that when people say a book is 'in the tradition of Gogol,' they really mean 'it's set somewhere East of Paris but West of Tokyo.' I guess this is in the tradition of Gogol, inasmuch as it's satirical, and not from Western Europe. But the point of Krasznahorkai's novel is not
Easily the best book I've read in the last six months.
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slight mockery-of-the-rurals. It is the sentences, the paragraphs rather, which pile up and leave you nowhere to go--and thank all that is holy for George Szirtes, who has made this masterpiece accessible to the linguistically impoverished! A distant second to the squat blocks of language that are thrust at us is the presence of the demonic and humankind's attempts, often enough successful, to outdo Satan's cruelty to ourselves. Otherwise, this is the kind of book you really want to give people like me, who grow ever more tired of and bored with twentieth century 'realism.' There's nothing particularly novel here in terms of structure, or point of view, or meta-literariness. There's just that language piling up and the depth of insights into human life. When Eszter finally broke and decides to "abjure thought," I nearly fainted with joy at Krasznahorkai's skill, while also fainting in fear of what that skill might have revealed. Easily the best book I've read in the last six months.
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Subjects
Awards
Europese Literatuurprijs (Longlist — 2017)
Language
Original language
Hungarian
Original publication date
1989 (original Hungarian)
1998 (English: Szirtes)
Physical description
415 p.; 21 cm
ISBN
9789028426702