The World Goes On by László Krasznahorkai (Translated by John Batki, Ottilie Mulzet & George Szirtes) - review by Adrian Nathan West

Adrian Nathan West

Spinning Out Yarns

The World Goes On

By

Tuskar Rock Press 311pp £14.99
 

Let’s begin by dispelling a misconception: in essence, László Krasznahorkai’s sentences aren’t long. While the use of the comma or coordinating conjunction in place of the full stop can imbue a writer’s words with a feeling of breathlessness or urgency (or, in the worst cases, of turgidity and torpor), in Krasznahorkai’s case it has little in common with the intricate, involuted sentences of Proust or the later Henry James. The point is not a minor one, in so far as the attention that critics and reviewers have given to this one aspect of his prose has created the impression of grotesque ornateness, whereas in truth, as Krasznahorkai’s frequent collaborator Béla Tarr has said, simplicity and purity are hallmarks of his work. There are exceptions, particularly in what some regard as his masterpiece, Seiobo There Below, but in general, a trademark Krasznahorkai phrase consists of a series of declaratives, sometimes in the first person, sometimes as reported speech, that hammer away at a single but somehow elusive point with a mounting accretion of adverbs and adjectives, as if amassed against the futility of expression.

The question is not whether Krasznahorkai is good, but whether the nearly universal praise accorded him is justified – whether he is the heir of Beckett and Dostoevsky he is made out to be, or a cult author whose peculiar preoccupations are both an allure and a limitation. There is no doubt that his writings are finely crafted, deeply researched and serious, but his insistent depiction of a single sort of down-and-out protagonist sputtering lugubrious ruminations of a more or less uniform character, albeit in an array of exotic and sinister settings, may try the patience of sceptics.

The World Goes On, a book of stories first published in Hungarian in 2013, while airier and less forbidding than the novels that came before it, continues along the trajectory they mark out. It opens with ‘Wandering-Standing’, the monologue of a man driven to flee, indeed incapable of remaining still, but at the same time stymied by the impossibility of departure. This sense of the double bind, made more horrible by Krasznahorkai’s suggestion that deliberation tends not towards insight but towards the recurrence of instinctive patterns of thought that bear no effective relationship to their objects, dominates the stories that follow. Throughout, the theme is escape: in ‘How Lovely’, a man dreams of a lecture series on area theory titled ‘There is no Area’; in ‘A Drop of Water’, a traveller driven half-mad by the chaos of Varanasi and the mystical harangues of an obese hydrologist runs to his hotel to pack up his things and sets off, taking care not to turn four times in the vain hope of avoiding a return to his starting point.

The longest story of the book, ‘Universal Theseus’, is also its best; in tone it recalls Kafka’s expository tales ‘Investigations of a Dog’ and ‘A Report to an Academy’. A man receives an invitation, for reasons never stated, to address an institution, the precise nature of which is unclear to him; not being a lecturer, he proceeds to recount a series of bizarre anecdotes: about the exhibition of a monstrous whale in the Hungarian backwoods (an incident treated in detail in Krasznahorkai’s earlier novel The Melancholy of Resistance), an indigent urinating in a metro station in Berlin and a bizarre visit to the post office. As an honorarium, he requests all documents remaining from his childhood, a revolver and 220,000 metres of yarn.

Among the more unsettling themes of Krasznahorkai’s writing is the corrosive effect of the longing for beauty. If, on occasion, real serenity penetrates his work, at other times his heroes’ flight towards transcendence produces inner devastation and augurs insanity or suicide. In ‘Nine Dragon Crossing’, an interpreter stationed in China sees the waterfall of his dreams on a hotel television, and the intimations concerning oneness and individuality it provokes instil in him an ecstatic longing for death. The climactic ‘That Gagarin’ imagines the life of the titular Russian cosmonaut in the years following his voyage into space. The narrator, a refugee whose stated desire to leave Earth colours his investigations, travels through Hungary seeking material concerning Gagarin and his fate and concludes that he ‘understood something, a millennial secret’ but, unable to transmit his insight, collapsed into alcoholic abjection. Convinced that what Gagarin had glimpsed was the confirmation of the Paradise of his dreams, the narrator readies himself for his own journey there, which begins with a plunge from a sixth-floor window.

Unfortunately, the better pieces here are padded out with the odd throwaway. ‘Bankers’ reads like a pastiche of Ronald Firbank on neoliberalism and ‘Journey in a Space Without Blessings’ is yet another manifestation of a regrettable trend for wringing solemnity from the Church and its rites that has also seduced such authors as J M Coetzee and the Spaniard Ricardo Menéndez Salmón. As a whole, The World Goes On is an eerie and thought-provoking book, but one for fans and completists rather than those unfamiliar with Krasznahorkai’s work.

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