a writer's notebook
Laszlo Krasznahorkai has won the Nobel Prize in Literature today, proving that the arc of the universe does sometimes bend towards justice. I’ve made various notes about his work over the years here, and here are some of them:
“Hi, look, someone knocked over all this stuff and dragged it around the garden and I can’t imagine who that it but it is definitely time for First Lunch”
GREAT NEWS: my favourite, Laszlo Krasznahorkai, has FINALLY won the Nobel Prize in Literature!
STATUS: 7hrs 51m sleep, my brain has been mush all week and I’m starting to grudgingly accept that I may need a day or two off. Inbox trashfire of 95, mostly receipts and newsletters… planning to head out of the house later to buy cheeses.
READING: THE BLAZING WORLD: A NEW HISTORY OF REVOLUTIONARY ENGLAND, Jomathan Healey (UK) (US+)
LISTENING: John Luther Adams ‘Become Ocean’
MISSION CONTROL: I can be contacted via the Cheng Caplan Company or Inkwell Management. Link in masthead to join my free newsletter.
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He secured the entrance of the path from the highway to the forest with a so-called Selbstschuss consisting of two fire-arms with reversed locks aimed horizontally at each other, affixed at chest height in a bush on each side of the path, with the triggers connected by a length of strong, transparent fishing line, so that when someone unsuspecting intended to turn into the woods and reached and triggered the line the Mannlichers would go off and the victim would execute himself. This “Selbstschuss” was originally used for big game, primarily bears, but of course Herman had other targets in mind.
A slim collection of three stories. The first, THE LAST WOLF, is one of old Laszlo’s single endless sentence jobs, played primarily for laughs and cringe through the first half, and then descending into his regular trick of using that form to inform a story of compulsion and obsession. There’s a tender little idea at the end of it.
The love of animals is the one true love in which one is never disappointed.
The last two stories are in fact the same story told from two different perspectives, thematically related to THE LAST WOLF, combining to create something of a cautionary tale about solitude, self-mythology, gossip and legend.
More of a curiosity than an essential Krasznahorkai, but time spent reading him is never wasted.
One CommentComments closed…we can simply wait for the end of the world, the universe, the whole, the Something, and we shall perish, but there is no need to wait for apocalypse, for we must understand—Florian wrote to Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin—that apocalypse is the natural state of life, the world, the universe, and of the Something, the apocalypse is now, Mrs. Chancellor, this is what we have been living in for billions of years and in comparison to the Beginning it is nothing…
What comes after history?
Temps mort. Dead time.
Nadim Mai excerpts her essay on Bela Tarr for the imminent remastered collection of his films. I love Tarr’s films, and think about them constantly, in the same way that his collaborator Krasznahorkai thinks constantly about Kafka.
Relating to that essay, Matt Webb:
Comments closedThe late 90s was liberalism in the ascendant; the triumph of capitalism (not yet neoliberalism) but tempered still (we weren’t aware) by the post-war social contract; pre 9/11; no internet in mainstream culture.
You could say we had our heads in the sand, and we did, enjoying the middle years of the long boom and the end of history and the benevolent shadow of the Pax Americana, meanwhile chucking missiles into Afghanistan and not really thinking about what they’d do.
We didn’t have the end of the world again until quite recently.
A Krasznahorkai I haven’t gotten around to reading yet, even though I’ve seen (and own) the film based on it. I have a couple other unread books by him on the Kindle, and suspect I’m unconsciously setting up a winter reading project.
THE MELANCHOLY OF RESISTANCE (UK) US+)
CONNECTED:
Turns out New Directions have been issuing a bunch of shorter Krasznahorkai pieces while my back was turned. I love Krasznahorkai but he requires stamina and long-duration reading sessions. Winter is coming. I can settle down for several hours with this and wonder again why he doesn’t have the Nobel for Literature.
SPADEWORK FOR A PALACE, Laszlo Krasznahorkai (UK) (US+)
I got hooked on Jaeggy with I AM THE BROThER OF XX, which it turns out I never wrote about. I need to do that before the end of the year.
THESE POSSIBLE LIVES, Fleur Jaeggy (UK) (US+)
I read REALITY HUNGER in hardback when it came out in 2010. Given where we are now (as painfully elaborated in IMMEDIACY), I wonder how David Shields views this bomb of a book today. When he wrote it, did he see Knausgaard sitting across the timeline, scratching his balls and complaining about having had to drive here with a rental car full of acolytes? Perhaps Shields might have sympathy with something Nik Cohn once said: “I wouldn’t have been so hard on Bob Dylan if I’d known Springsteen was coming.” Maybe Shields has stood before the contemporary publishing lists choked with trauma-narrative’d autotheoretical autofictive slop like Oppenheimer at Trinity. I felt like I needed a re-read: it’s a very entertaining piece of assemblage.
REALITY HUNGER, David Shields (UK) (US+)
One CommentFor a certain kind of movie fan, Anderson’s movies are a Rorschach test of how we look at film, not just whether we value story or character or spectacle, but how we even define these core elements of the art form.
THE WORLD GOES ON by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, translated from the Hungarian by John Batki, Ottilie Mulzet, and Georges Szirtes, is a collection of short stories, and probably the most accessible of Krasznahorkai’s works. My favourite Amazon review of this book is as follows:
Long, drawn out, and difficult to read. Mistake to propose for book club
I love that.
We are in the midst of a cynical self-reckoning as the not-too-illustrious children of a not-too-illustrious epoch that will consider itself truly fulfilled only when every individual writhing in it—after languishing in one of the deepest shadows of human history—will finally attain the sad and temporarily self-evident goal: oblivion.
Old Laszlo is not the cheeriest of souls. He has co-written two of the best films of the century: WERCKMEISTER HARMONIES and THE TURIN HORSE. He is, in fact, difficult to read, because he’s one of that school of writers who will write a sentence that’s twenty pages long. There’s less of that in THE WORLD GOES ON, because he’s writing short stories and has a point to get to, where his novels tend to be long journeys where the voyage has more value than the destination.
Let me be clear, though: I would stand the first section of his BARON WENCKHEIM’S HOMECOMING, with the mad hermit in the woods living inside a house made entirely of polystyrene packing material, against anything written in the last fifty years. I don’t know why he doesn’t have a Nobel Prize, but, then again, they didn’t give one to Borges either.
…an infinite melancholy seized my soul . . .what shall I compare it to, it was like honey—you know, the kind where a spoonful is enough to kill anyone.
There is Borges in him, and Beckett. A section of THE WORLD GOES ON is dedicated to Beckett, and there’s an echo of Beckett in the title itself – “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” – but that section, and much of his other work, also has the murk of Kafka to it. The man himself once said:
“When I am not reading Kafka I am thinking about Kafka. When I am not thinking about Kafka I miss thinking about him. Having missed thinking about him for a while, I take him out and read him again. That’s how it works.”
Anyway. Twenty one short stories framed by statements of a narrator. Each one, at its root, a modern fable. Each one a darkly surreal sketch of an emotion (or a tangle of conflicting emotions), a philosophical premise, a human conundrum, a story of life out on its blurry forbidden edge zones.
…for us works of art no longer contain narrative or time, nor can we claim that others might ever be able to find a way toward making sense of things.
Consider it an introduction to a very particular, very peculiar view of life, the universe and everything, beamed out from a hideaway in the Hungarian hills by a mad scientist of literature. All told with a grim smile and tools he invented in his own secret lab.
Krasznahorkai is a furious thinker, and every piece of his work is a journey of discovery. Sometimes it’s hard, sometimes you just flow with it, but it’s always worth it. If you’re ready for a hard book by a giant of literature who thinks differently, this winter, start here.
THE WORLD GOES ON, Laszlo Krasznahorkai
