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.)

Santango by László Krasznahorkai, tr. George Szirtes

One of the monuments of contemporary world literature, awarded the 2013 Best Translated Book Award, and among the works which contributed to Krasznahorkai's win of the last (2015) body-of-work based Booker International Prize. At time of cross-posting this review to the blog, I still haven't seen the Béla Tarr film.

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The setting was half-familiar to me from reading Polish literature recently, the run-down central European village - most like the one in Andrzej Stasiuk's Tales of Galicia (1995), but ten years earlier, as Eastern Bloc Communism crumbles, (not afterwards, as everyone looks around, bewildered, asking "what now?") As if villages in Olga Tokarczuk had fallen into disrepair, or Wioletta Greg without the Cider With Rosie glow. The German names in Satantango surprised me for a minute, but of course, this was once the Austro-Hungarian Empire too, like some of those in the the old southern partition of Poland.

Everything in Satantango is decaying and, as the autumn rains start, floods with mud. With hindsight it looks like a clear metaphor for the crumbling Communist state.In 1985 did it look in real life as if things were moribund? I don't know enough about Hungarian history to be sure, though it seems not unlikely. It's clear from this old article (old enough that it says "Krasznahorkai is not a fashionable writer") that the book was a major event in intellectual circles in mid-80s Hungary. It was "anything but an unproblematic novel for the Communist system", and published by a strange chance.

The use of the word "estate" instead of "collective farm" in the translation initially threw me. "Estate"? I thought this was under Communism. The first sentence of the plot summary on the film's Wikipedia page reorientated me, and I referred back to this summary on a few other occasions, for a handle on what was happening, making allowances for the order of some scenes being rearranged in the adaptation. (Not a purist approach to reading, to look this up, but the introductions in Penguin Classics often give more away than using Wikipedia in lieu of footnotes.)

There's nary a post about Satantango that doesn't use the word bleak. But there's bleak and there's bleak. On the scale of This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen (which I read a couple of weeks earlier) and The Unwomanly Face of War (an audiobook I was in the middle of), most of Satantango is, 'yeah, shit happens'. A bunch of working class people in late middle age lose their savings to a swindler and leave their homes for new jobs with on-site accommodation - with evident parallels to communist collectivisation. But the characters are able to work. And unless the jobs and rooms are a mirage, there are plenty in this country now less fortunate. It is bleaker though, when a child with a learning disability, from a family that would have had social work involvement in a better-organised community, kills the family cat and then herself. That would be hideous stuff for the headlines here too. A local man known as the doctor - a retired academic? he doesn't seem especially medical and displays no characteristics of a Time Lord - and with habits similar to old-school programmers with autistic traits, like Michael in Microserfs, turns out not just to have been observing the villagers, but to have been the writer of most of what we've just been reading, in true 1980s metafiction style. I was hearing echoes of a less sexually voyeuristic Samson Young from Martin Amis' London Fields (1989) - or rather, something earlier that both Amis and Krasznahorkai could have read. So there's bleak and there's bleak. But the book well and truly has a damp problem; I could almost feel it catching and clogging in my lungs; if you put anything down for half a day in Satantango there would be mildew on it, and you'd get mud up to your knees just from going a few steps from the front door.

I was surprised to read somewhere that Krasznahorkai had written his student dissertation on Sándor Márai, although surprised only because I'd read one or two Goodreads reviews by readers who felt Embers was middlebrow or something of that ilk. There isn't much of Márai in English. Among the positives I had heard about Embers was its atmosphere of decay, faded glamour and cobwebbed aristocracy. It hardly seems a stretch to consider that this miasma - perhaps from Márai more generally, not just that one book - probably influenced Krasznahorkai, who, with his youthful interest in "the downstairs of society" transferred it instead to a different social stratum.

It was a relief to find this essay on three of Krasznahorkai's books, including Satantango, by a bilingual critic, which observes that this, George Szirtes' version, one of his early translations of Krasznahorkai, "blur[s] or render[s] inconsistent the distinct voices and linguistic registers" of the characters. I felt a sort of flatness and sameness to many scenes, which evoked a humdrum form of bleakness (a life of boring work and meagre means that has to be got used to, with banter and dancing as periodic escapism) - but it also meant it did not usually feel like a truly spectacular novel, simply a good one. It wasn't meant to be quite like this, then. Characters who had echoes of the larger-than-life should have been bigger, more emphatically individual than I found them to be. The depth is in the occasional paragraphs of philosophical observations; as with Tokarczuk's Drive Your Plow, this is said to be one of the author's more accessible works, with a lower density of these than in their heftier books.

Where the narrative did, unquestionably, sing, was in two distinct set-piece chapters.
First, the most horrific episode, little Esti and the cat, and subsequent events. It is impossible to know for sure if it is an entirely accurate evocation of the mindset of a child like her, but it feels utterly true. Half like trying to chase down and kill mosquitoes in a bedroom before going to sleep: the declaration of battle, the dramatic arcs of the focused, sometimes frantic, sometimes exhausted endeavour, every detail of the unpredictable, protracted pursuit of the live thing and times of remorse and times of doggedness. And half like the moment within an almighty, lightheaded temper, in which the tantrum-haver realises with a sinking stomach that they've already made things this bad, very bad, and it feels as if there's no choice but to keep going, so they do, resolutely with further destruction.

The scene with the party clerks could hardly be more different: essentially a comedy sketch, as bureaucrats parse and translate into appropriate official language a report about the villagers for the secret police files - it sends up the bumbling and sinister state structures as well as the characters we've just been hearing about. There's a levity underlying it which seems to indicate these things aren't quite as much of a threat as in works from the 50s and 60s, emerging from the shadows of Stalinism. The decay of the state apparatus appears to make more humour possible, even while living conditions deteriorate.

I'd looked at Satantango a few times in August and September, feeling that I wanted to read it soon. I hadn't consciously remembered it began "One morning near the end of October", but it was just then, around the end of October when I started reading it properly. It was a few days after I finished Anna Burns' Milkman, this year's Booker winner. Previously, I had felt the tension in reading Krasznahorkai's long sentences whenever I opened Satantango. After Milkman, with its also-long sentences and lack of paragraph breaks, but easy conversational rhythm, I hardly even thought about the sentence length in Satantango except once or twice: I was acclimatised.


I was initially amazed how different it was from the only other Krasznahorkai book I'd read, Seiobo There Below (2008). But of course a gap of over 20 years, from age 30 to 50+ is going to mean some differences in a person's, a writer's outlook. Hopefully significant differences, otherwise they'd be stagnating. I was glad of this discussion which prompted me to see the "bleak" and "transcendent" worldviews of the two books (and Krasznahorkai's work generally) as the development, or two sides of, the same idea. Satantango is concerned with pointlessness and nothingness in a melancholy fashion, and with a negative view of these concepts in the European intellectual and religious tradition. It's someone still grappling with these ideas and feelings, who hasn't accepted that's how things are and shifted focus elsewhere. (His European books tend to be 'bleak'.) Seiobo seems to arrive after a process of facing-up-to and positive deployment of nothingness, and meditation on death and decay, part of a road to awakening in Buddhist and yogic traditions; the 2008 book's focus is on a sense of the sacred and beauty predominantly in art. (His Far-Eastern books are interested in the transcendent.)

Understanding this - and also reading several interviews with Krasznahorkai, and the stories in The Last Wolf/ Herman, which I liked very much - meant I started to find Krasznahorkai more intriguing as a person and a writer, that he was a a writer whose work it felt possible to connect with. I felt I could see in the difference between Satantango and Seiobo part of the shift he describes here: When I was young ... I regarded [nature] as hostility itself... Later, when I was influenced by Chinese and Japanese culture, their worldview changed my attitude completely, and I started to reckon nature as the locus of mystery and of epiphany ... And now I tend to think that the only thing that exists is nature, that nothing else is real but nature, and the reality one perceives is similarly nature itself, beyond which only void resides.
He was no longer simply a writer whom I felt I should make more effort to read, and who was vaguely interesting in a detached way. Characters in Satantango sometimes felt like archetypes or symbols more than individuals you might meet, so the underlying ideas became important in animating the narrative.

(read Oct 2018, reviewed Nov 2018; the review on Goodreads.)

The Last Wolf / Herman by László Krasznahorkai, tr. George Szirtes & John Batki

After finishing Satantango I decided to bag another short Krasznahorkai book. I hadn't expected it to be my favourite of his works I've read.
This short volume of two stories (I can't be the only person who's had more than enough of the phrase 'slim volume', can I?) was published in English in 2016. It was longlisted for the 2017 US Best Translated Book Award. The stories are thematically similar, but separated by 23 years: 'The Last Wolf' appeared in its Hungarian original in 2009, but 'Herman' was in his first short story collection, from 1986. (Thanks to this article in Music & Literature magazine where I checked that info just now.)

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At last, a Krasznahorkai work I really connect with. Reading Sátántangó a few days ago, I realised that strength of personal connection was what would make the difference between giving his books 4 stars (as I did Sátántangó and Seiobo There Below) or 5, because I can't seem to find them as utterly singular as many of his English-language worshippers do. (I'm still not sure what they see that I don't; or if I'm arrogant - I probably sound it, because he has been placed on a pedestal as the author who is an epitome of 'difficult' and 'for those in the know', as DFW used to be c.15 years ago - or if I have simply read different things that make his themes seem more familiar, which is what it feels like.)

I loved The Last Wolf for simple thematic reasons. Because the narrator is a washed-up minor academic and writer who seems to have been offered an interesting piece of work by mistake, but he grabs it anyway, in a way I for one found wholly relatable. Because it's set in Extremadura, the only part of Spain I've ever really found fascinating. (When I did Spanish at school, I wasn't that interested in anywhere else, and I've never felt that you hear enough about Extremadura. But you wouldn't because a lot of it is a rural semi-wilderness.) And because it's fiction about the natural world and its destruction - similar to the sort that Amitav Ghosh and Richard Powers have recently exhorted readers and writers of English-language literary fiction towards, trying to mainstream ideas already established in eco-criticism. But written earlier (2009), in a different literary culture and by an author of this calibre, The Last Wolf follows its own path.

I was impressed by the narrator's being so moved, unexpectedly affected, by the demise of the last Spanish wolves - as were some other, but emphatically not all, characters. He's the sort of protagonist who, in many novels, is immersed in the insular concerns of the artist and in bad love-affairs, but here he cares about something beyond himself without its being presented as a cloying life-lesson. It was conveyed so very well that it never risked cheesiness or sentimentality (which, I am realising, Krasznahorkai, is skilled in averting). The narrator's silent annoyance with the interpreter at the height of the story - as she became so involved in the story she no longer interpreted it fully - neutered that possibility, and introduced a marvellous emotional honesty to the moment that so many other authors would have neglected or skimmed over. (A very Buddhist awareness of emotion is one of the unifying points of the 'bleak' and 'transcendent' sides of Krasznahorkai's work.) The Last Wolf is a work about form and style as much as it is about its topic, and so it could never be dismissed as either 'issue fiction' or 'style over substance'. (Setting up ideals of art is not a very good idea, and can be constraining, but I have to admit this is one of mine at the moment: not art versus politics, but both at once in the same work.)

It felt right to be reading this over Hallowe'en and the following days of the dead, and as further statistics on the extent of wildlife extinction hit the news. It would have been too heavy-handed as a deliberate choice, but I'd ended up reading it because it was mentioned in a discussion thread I'd looked at while reading Sátántangó, and I was so interested in the topic of The Last Wolf I had to look at it before I'd finished the previous book.

The complex framing - the narrator is telling much of the story of what happened in Spain to a bartender at his local in Berlin, some time (probably years) later - and the wide ranging across Europe by a depressive character reminded me at times of Sebald's Austerlitz. But the sentence, the whole story being one sentence, was of course far longer than any of Sebald's. The whole story may be one long sentence, but it does not double-back on itself (like late Henry James, or parts of Seiobo): it always moves forward, which means that it is not as complex an experience as some might assumed. Only once ever did I look back, and then only one page, to make sure of what a clause referred to. My gradual steps up in reading narrative styles over a week or so, from Anna Burns' Milkman to Sátántangó to this meant The Last Wolf didn't feel tense, as I often find works in very long sentences do. The single-sentence structure was merely a reminder that within the frame, this was a story being told all in one go; and by the end, it related the story to where the narrator was at, psychologically, at the time of telling the story. (Krasznahorkai has said that he finds short sentences artificial, whilst long ones seem to him to more accurately reflect conversation and thought.)

The frequency of German place-names in Sátántangó were a reminder that the setting was the territory of the old Austro-Hungarian empire, a larger and more mixed territory than the post-war, Communist, mostly-ethnically-Hungarian Hungary. In the firmly post-Communist Last Wolf, the narrator, free to travel as a European intellectual from an EU country, wanders former Hapsburg lands: a Hungarian on his uppers resident in Berlin, he finds himself summoned over to Spain, and then returns to Germany.

The two Herman stories were first published in 1986, a year after Sátántangó: like the novel, they have a dank rural setting, and grapple with characters' dark inner thoughts about their relationship to the world.

Part of me always reads any story about gamekeepers, poachers and their techniques through Danny the Champion of the World (by far my favourite Roald Dahl book as a kid - though no-one else's that I ever met - and one of the few books I read so often that my copy looked worn, whilst back then I could read a book twice and still leave it looking brand new). I wasn't expecting to be made to revisit it and that past self now, remembering creeping through the wood with them (how badly I wanted to do that or to be them; sometimes it was my greatest wish!), hoping bait worked, lost in the process, irrelevant in the moment which side one was on - and having to feel and see that alongside my later, more informed and harder-line opinions about the repeated introduction of an invasive species to just to kill it and generally disrupt the local ecosystem.

Herman part I, 'The Game Warden', the tale of a gamekeeper who changes sides, could have been trite in almost any other hands. I wasn't quite convinced this would be something that could have really happened then and there, or occurred to a similar real man, rather than an artist's idea - but the depth of Krasznahorkai's attention to mental processes, and especially his unsentimental relating of them at junctures where most other writers would concentrate on action or cheap crowd-pleasing emotion, elevates it to a level far above obvious poetic justice. He renders the existential and depressive and grubby into some kind of high Gothic, so that one can marvel at the way he describes it and at the baroque darkness of the atmosphere, rather than being dragged down.

Part II, 'Death of a Craft' is subtitled "contra Yukio Mishima". I haven't read any Mishima; I only know a little about him by reputation, and any parallels I draw between this story and other books here are merely free association, and have a major lacuna. A louche crowd of shaggers, army officers and women from the city, visit the small town where Herman is active (tagging along, in somewhat unlikely, but certainly decadent fashion, because one of their number is visiting her seriously ill mother, who lives in the town). I couldn't help but reflect on how contemporary kink types would (mostly) use very different, rather prosaic terminology. Here, written in Hungary in the mid 80s these people are a little exotic, tinged with the sentiments of notorious transgressive books like The Story of the Eye (although I'm sure what they were up to is actually not shocking at all by contemporary Western standards, unlike the escapades in that book). I liked the way none of their number had obvious views that might be expected from urbanites about Herman (especially enjoyed the giggling at the phrase 'noxious predators', a term frequently repeated in the earlier story), and that their view of him was related rather neutrally - although, in retrospect, it wasn't entirely convincing that none of the party would have divergent opinions about the gamekeeper-gone-wild. (And like Sátántangó and The Last Wolf, the Herman stories are full of names that are both German and Hungarian.)

This whole volume - and Herman I: 'The Game Warden', especially, makes a fantastic companion-piece to Olga Tokarczuk's recently-translated Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, which I read a month ago - and which was published in its original Polish in 2009, the same year as The Last Wolf was released in Hungarian. So far as I can tell, the 1986 story collection that originally included Herman has not been translated into Polish, but it was published in German in 1988. 'The Game Warden' and Plow provide two similar critiques of hunting in cultures where it's much more accepted and normal than it is in Britain; the ultimate point of divergence between the two is to be around religion / Christianity. The sense of universal compassion which emerges near the end of 'The Game Warden', whilst couched in the language of Christianity, is syncretic and can also be taken in the context of the Buddhist values and worldviews that become explicit in Seiobo, and quite possibly other works by Krasznahorkai which I have not read or which are unavailable in English. Krasznahorkai aims for the transcendent and spiritual (Herman could be seen to have achieved a stage of enlightenment and/or to have been progressing towards it in a misguided fashion, by acting out what should have remained an inner realisation) whereas Tokarczuk's book makes a critique of the earthly Polish Catholic Church.

(Finished and reviewed Nov 2018; the review on Goodreads.)

Seiobo There Below by László Krasznahorkai, tr. Ottilie Mulzet

This is an old review from 2014 (pasted to this blog in Feb 2019) and as with a lot of my old writing, there are bits of it that make me cringe now. But as I've posted my three other Krasznahorkai reviews on here (all from 2018), I thought I may as well add this one too. At the time, I'd been active on the old-format, now-defunct Mookse and the Gripes forum for about a year and a half. Seiobo There Below had won the 2014 BTBA and was talked about, there and elsewhere, as a particularly difficult yet rewarding book. I hadn't felt up to reading something like this at the time of the prize, but decided to have a go that December.

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A tad overhyped, this (in some quarters). It's an interesting and unusual book, of interlocking short stories about art, beauty and the sacred. I'm not saying emperor's new clothes - but some of the superlatives...

- Unique, like nothing else. [Collective gist.]
A non-exhaustive list of things I was reminded of whilst reading Seiobo There Below: documentaries about art & building restoration; documentaries about and visits to buddhist monasteries; meditation and writing and talks on; How to Be Both by Ali Smith; Revenge by Yoko Ogawa; history lessons; the puzzles in Georges Perec books; the number/chapter games in The Luminaries; experiences of arriving somewhere ill-prepared, or feeling irritable whilst in queues; other long-sentence writers, especially in the German tradition. (All those 'as it were's were very familiar.)

- an impossibly wide range of knowledge
Seiobo is undoubtedly a knowledge and terminology-heavy book. However, nearly all of that knowledge is from two domains.
a) Mainstream European [art] history of the medieval & early modern period: a repetitive surfeit of Ital Ren; the Alhambra; Andrei Rublev. (Also, a reasonable knowledge of the bible is necessary for studying that period. Anyway, I wonder if this stuff seems more exotic to Americans, for whom it isn't so standard in curricula and holiday destinations.)
b) Traditional Japanese culture. Not a few enthusiasts of that around, and not an unusual overlapping interest with art history.
This is depth more than breadth: it's possible to see one person checking all this from a handful textbooks if he didn't know it already off the top of his head - it's not the vastly disparate facts that Pynchon employs researchers to verify; different from the scale of Perec who mentions stuff from many domains, giving a sense of how much general knowledge there is in a whole other culture; having been the sort of kid who read encyclopaedias for fun in Britain did little more than scratch the surface.
Part of the point is, of course, comparison with the likes of Perec - not with most other literary fiction published in 2014.


For a book I'd heard spoken of for the fascinating, intoxicating properties hidden beneath this plain cover*, it got a touch monotonous at times. Did we really need that many C15th-C16th artists' workshops? And such a lot of obvious destinations in the European sections, Italy, Spain, Greece: bloody Cook's Tour. (The Romanian lake and the land sculpture of the horse, though, was exactly the kind of strange and wonder I'd come here for.) Most main characters are men who are in late middle age and/or Hungarian. Surely the fabled Krasznahorkai does better than writing self-inserts? Among the most memorable lead characters were those who differed noticeably from the template, especially the Dostoevskyan working class Hungarian (still a Hungarian) stranded in Barcelona by an employment scam, and the embarrassed young Japanese chap trying to cope with his Euro friend's frequent faux pas at 'The Rebuilding of the Ise Shrine'.

Seiobo There Below had become a barometer or test to me since I first looked at it in March. I had a specific block on, or a very high threshold for, processing the run-on sentences of the first chapter. A couple of pages and my mind felt like a failing printer with 30 items backing up in the queue; soon jammed, it ground to a halt completely. And this wasn’t just at the worst times when I might expect that: even whilst I was up to enjoying Blinding: The Left Wing by Mircea Cărtărescu or The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth – books of comparable difficulty in the eyes of many - I couldn’t properly process this. But I kept looking at the sample (I must have read chapter 1 about ten times by now). On a couple of occasions, the text started to flow and so I got a copy, having become determined to conquer this thing at some hoped-for suitable time.

I’d now say that the first chapter, along with the first page each of chapters 377 (13) and 2584 (17 - they have Fibonacci numbers), is considerably more dense structurally than the rest of the book. (My head finds abstract sentences more challenging to deal with than specialist terminology.) Through the early chapters, I was aware of a slight physical tension produced by the multi-page sentences. Sometimes it suited the content very well (e.g. the harried, overheated tourist ‘Up on the Acropolis’). At others, whilst I understood their use as creating a sense of long-term unity for scenes that develop slowly, such as during ‘The Preservation of a Buddha’, this tension didn’t always seem appropriate to the subject, and I thought Krasznahorkai could perhaps have written some scenes in shorter sentences and others long to fit rhythm and mood of actions taking place**. Throughout the book, sentences, though extremely long, almost never had the sort of complexity I’d been apprehensive about. They don’t go back to an earlier point after a three page anecdote , rarely even a three-line one. It all flows along like a stream. (And sometimes the camera pans to a scene of another stream that’s a tributary of the same river.) Simply there are, for page after page, commas and conjunctions where full stop, space, capital letter would normally be found. A portion of the tension came from chopping up these sentences and editing in the conventional punctuation in my head – making a conscious decision about the ‘pause to take breath’ that Gertrude Stein acknowledged was part of the purpose of the punctuation she rejected on paper. Regardless, it was always hypnotic: more than with most books, it was easy to fall into it for pages and pages and not look up - I even remained engrossed at times when I had to use a book stand, not something I like. At some point, into the second day of reading, I stopped noticing: it wasn’t a problem any more, I wasn’t tense and I didn’t need to repunctuate consciously. I was just reading. It’s not Finnegan’s Wake.

A lot of this post so far has been about blowing raspberries at Krasznahorkai, or rather his reputation - but there are many, many wonderful things in Seiobo There Below. This is a work which, unusually, understands deeply meditative and reverent states, and great darkness and black comedy. Several chapters end with a sudden sting in the tail - most of these made me laugh; and I loved the way that they could turn a scene on its head without diminishing its earlier meaning. And whilst he does deal with some hackneyed subjects (who needs another postcard from the Alhambra or Florence for instance?... Especially at this distance, in a book, not in the place, I was sometimes like Brancoveanu, the sceptical colleague of the Venus de Milo worshipping Louvre security guard character, the one who feels the sculpture is trite) Krasznahorkai does bring a sprinkling of extra magic to these locations, conjured from detailed information that's less often heard, and from the meditation-like state of the prose which is intended to mirror both the transcendent experience of viewing great art on one hand, and the taut rope of sustained concentration, and the near-impossible perfectionism (which would be denigrated in many other scenarios) needed to produce it.

I wrote detailed summaries of all chapters(in the status updates below). But personal favourite pieces were:
- 'Kamo-Hunter' - a heron hunting, a beautiful creature yet predatory, nature and its cycles living alongside the bustle and buses of Kyoto, a city where the book returns several times. (Seiobo appears to follow the same classical Japanese tradition as Ogawa's Revenge, stories which are in some respects separate but which contain motifs and themes shared, though not according to a mechanical sequence.)
- 'Up On the Acropolis' - Just simple identification, this kind of journey, the eager adventure, the draining effort, having forgotten something vital. How often have I had this? (Though not, of course, the last few lines.)
- 'Something is Burning Outside' - at an artists' workshop in the Romanian countryside, no-one seems very productive. An impoverished-looking old man arrives, who turns out to be nationally famous artist Ion Grigorescu. Early one morning two other artists go out for a walk and find him and his project. [Grigorescu is real and I found this page for a Tate exhibition that included him. Watching its video led me to another artist's photographs of Armenia juxtaposing beautiful snow scenes and decaying concrete tower blocks of stunning yet brutal design.]
- 'Private Passion'. A scene which would have been quite different, laughable probably, in the medium of film or radio. An old architect, of repulsive appearance and grating voice, delivers an adult education lecture to a few bored, numbed Swiss villagers. He is, at best, a buffoon - worse, experienced by his audience as a Job-like test. His crazy passion for the music of the Baroque has a Byronic intensity which comes through on the page, making it possible to hear how differently it might have been received from a person who was attractive and charismatic, and to consider the idea of a personality trapped inside an exterior shell that doesn't match. (Or did Krasznahorkai just write this text too well for this character?)
- 'Screaming Beneath the Earth' - I don't really agree with the extent of darkness which things, life and death are viewed in this final chapter (c.f. some people find looking at the stars and thinking how insignficant we are to be depressing, I find it comforting). But the archaeological vision in this piece was exhilarating, of all these past creatures under the ground.
- In general, I've become more interested in Shinto, and the unique way in which an ancient animist / pagan religion remains part of every day life in a highly developed country. (Amazing to imagine if we still had continuous traditions like this.) It's thanks, I'm guessing, to Japan's long isolation from monotheisms, and the economic strength and stability that allowed it to forge ahead for itself without subjection to significant outside influences.

There is great stuff in Seiobo There Below, but it doesn't have the magic for me that it does for many other readers; it wasn't a transcendent experience, though it was meditative. I daresay a few others in time will find the characters a little samey. Nonetheless, there's be an ineffable something I just don't get, as with my similar underwhelmed-but-not-disliking reaction to another of the Best Translated Book Longlist, Stig Saetterbakken's Through the Night. I'd still rate a few of those longlisted books higher than this one, and, contrary to almost every opinion I've read, think the Cărtărescu better for its unusual fusion of biological science and surrealism and narrative - art in literature has been done often enough (and there's been a lot of it about in 2014 publications). I wasn't quite in the mood for these topics and places right now - the Mediterranean, Japan - they feel more summery: I wanted the dark and brooding of central European traditon, which likely would have been better served by Satantango rather than Krasznahorkai's sunlight-dappled, meditation-infused, voyage away from home.


* The chest on the cover, as well as being an obvious metaphor for looking into, opening up etc, refers to a trousseau-chest from the school of Botticelli that features in chapter 2. Its outline and the title lettering are made of a rainbow-shimmery stuff most familiar from kids' stationery. So up close, not entirely as plain as it looks.

** There's a pretty good discussion about Krasznahorkai's sentences in this interview and the comments. Shame that, despite the mention of his 'broken English', that people sharp enough to kno)w better then take his phrase 'loss of a culture of poverty' at face value rather than considering consumerism and folk culture.


(read and reviewed December 2014; the review - and dozens of quotes and status updates - on Goodreads