The Bill: For Palma Vecchio, at Venice by László Krasznahorkai, tr. George Szirtes

This Krasznahorkai short story was printed as a standalone work in a collector's limited edition volume by Sylph Editions, illustrated with a number of Palma Vecchio paintings. I read it on Scribd as a short story in the Dalkey Archive Press collection Best European Fiction 2011, and looked at some of Palma Vecchio's art online. This means I looked at it as a story instead of book-as-object.

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It is about the moment of anticipation as the best illustration of desire (though that is reductive; Krasznahorkai's long sentence explores the byways and corners of thought and feeling involved in that idea); told from the apparent viewpoint of a pimp who provides courtesans to Palma Vecchio, who uses them only as models. (The women's initial mockery and/or bewilderment about that, of the client not wanting sexual services, is something that never seems to be found in recent serious fiction or memoir about prostitution by female authors - instead there is, IIRC, relief at less work - but there is so little historically by women to compare that delves into inner thoughts in that situation to compare with modern writers' attitudes.) The narrator suggests that their figures, in the way Palma Vecchio paints them, evoke the undulations of the landscape of Bergamo where the artist grew up (this has a mocking tone to try and evade pretentiousness and tenuousness). The girls laugh at their colleagues or themselves later appearing as the Virgin Mary and other holy women. "I myself think we're all nothing but bodies" the narrator says, irreligiously.

This small book clearly has its fans: the presentation copy will be part of that, though I think this story would have worked better in a themed collection with other pieces to reflect and refract. It feels especially dense for a work of so few pages, dense in its observation of minutiae, but there is not quite enough, I think, for it to work on its own - if the point of the volume were the paintings, a compendium of most of Palma Vecchio's paintings, and the story an accompaniment to them more unusual than gallery-style labels, then it would seem weightier, if I may speculate on a book I've never seen a copy of. At any rate, what I can say after writing this post is that the style is somewhat infectious.

Historical fiction often isn't involving enough to distract me from wondering about research and evidence, but in the second half, because of the narrative's immersion in thought processes, this managed it.

(read and reviewed Nov 2018; the review on Goodreads. The review has been edited slightly for clarity when I cross-posted to the blog.)