László Krasznahorkai’s ‘The World Goes On’ Stands in Defiance to Its Own Despair
When Americans read innovative Eastern or Central European fiction, their minds often linger on three or four particularly phenomenal and unique writers—Nikolai Gogol, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Franz Kafka—and their distinct but related strains of surrealist writing. When American readers first encounter the name László Krasznahorkai, whom Susan Sontag described as “the Hungarian master of the apocalypse,” they might come to expect from him that same sense of spectacle and bleak humor implied in his multisyllabic name. Sontag’s prescription in particular—an exceptional blurb, to be fair—stokes the apocalyptic flames of expectation. The World Goes On, Krasznahorkai’s newest collection of short stories translated into English, paradoxically follows the Kafkaesque tradition of surprise by not surrendering to the surreal. In fact, the new book from “the Hungarian master of the apocalypse” conveys an assaulted sense of hope more reminiscent of Charles Bukowski than Bulgakov. That’s not to say Krasznahorkai doesn’t delve into the nightmarish—he does, but with unremarkable relentlessness rather than showy surrealism.
Bulgakov’s name, incidentally, does come up—Ixi Fortinbras, a man visiting his friend-turned-banker, Paul, in Ukraine, wants to visit the famous writer’s old home. Instead, he spends most of the story in a car, eavesdropping on thecomes to read like a litany of such obsessions. Listing them will, like a quick description of any fixation, give you no idea of the actual life surrounding them, but it will give you some sense of the breadth of Krasznahorkai’s obsession with obsessions. They include: the world, motion, the death and internal life of cosmonaut, artistic depictions of sex-workers, water, waterfalls, rivers, drops of water, and more. Water, that vital thing, seems to signify Krasznahorkai’s entire project. His prose certainly tumbles like a waterfall—whole stories run in single sentences, but this seems less stylistic and more intrinsically tied to the stories themselves, as though they couldn’t be told any other way. Even so, Krasznahorkai’s prose can sometimes try a reader’s patience. It can’t really be read aloud faithfully either, at least not in a way that won’t leave you frustrated or passed out. A reader’s eye will sometimes find itself submerged, searching the page for a place to begin again when it loses Krasznahorkai’s complicated but finely woven thread of thought. Like water, his writing blends into a seamless, rushing whole. Uninterrupted clauses filter into paragraphs that often stretch multiple pages—a veritable torrent of text that resembles a shape of significance, a body of water or a startling moment of human life.
