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I have always struggled with Krasznahorkai. Even when I like him, even when I acknowledge his ability to produce exquisite prose, bleak landscapes, and fascinating characters, I have never really enjoyed reading him. This is generally something that I can put to one side when he gives me the dark, almost post-apocalyptic atmosphere of Satantango or The Melancholy of Resistance, but when he goes on these modern or ancient tangents, I find it rather unbearable. War and War was a real nightmare of uninteresting meandering stream-of-consciousness and this... well, this was probably the least I've ever enjoyed his work. Which is strange because this is essentially a collection of short stories, loosely related vignettes, under the umbrella of a wider theme. And I hated it.

Maybe I only noticed it this time around (or maybe he utilised this particular technique more overtly here) but the sentences that never end became very tiresome. For Christ's sake, use a full stop from time to time, Laszlo. And can we dispense with the walls of text for a while? It serves what purpose, illuminates what aspect, elevates which ideas? Then we have the almost fetishisitc use of the em-dash for interrupted thought which is just relentless. It reminded me of that criticism of the German language made by Mark Twain where he points out that in German the word 'de-parted' can be interrupted by swathes of flowery language before the reader even knows what conclusion is coming ("The trunks now being ready he DE... after kissing his mother and sisters, and once pressing to his bosom his adored Gretchen, who, dressed in simple white muslin, with a single tuberose in the ample folds of her rich brown hair had tottered feebly down the stairs....[insert yet more language here]... whom she loved more dearly than life itself... PARTED.") What if it isn't the word departed? What if it's de-stroyed or de-fenestrated? You have to read all the waffle before you get to the verb, to the fundamental part which provides any context. At which point, you've read so much without any clarification that you have to go back and start again. I do not enjoy reading without context and there's a lot of that here.

As for the content itself, as I said, it's a variety of stories (each more boring than the last) which really do test your patience. It starts with a bird, then a painting, then a wooden statue of Buddha, then a man wearing tap dancing shoes who's being followed. By this point, I was sincerely struggling to care. I found the writing strangely dull, forced, and inauthentic. There was another story about a guy in Greece. And one about a security guard at the Louvre but I found it almost painful to keep reading any of it. At no point can you say that the writing is bad, it's just overly stylised and designed to be challenging for its own sake. This seems to be deliberate and, dare I say it, performative. I have a theory: The more accessible literature becomes in the modern world (a thousand books published per day), the more we instinctively want to celebrate horrible and unpleasant writing as the most meaningful because it's difficult and challenging. We kid ourselves that this means it's good, at the very least means that it stands out against all that countless drivel and mediocrity which is suspiciously easy to read and overwhelms the bookshops now. Even worse, it results in the genuinely mediocre writing of people like Jon Fosse. We so desperately want literature to be significant, to be more than just...  a story about a thing... that we encourage writers to go down this road, to appeal to the coffee shop hipsters who conflate obscurity with high status, and create a swamp of repetition and dense language which is deliberately unpleasant to read because we think this must demonstrate complexity. Maybe that's true for Fosse but for someone with genuine talent like Krasznahorkai, I think it only serves to make him squander his obvious talent.

I wish writers like Krasznahorkai would stop trying so hard. I don't need literature to define my personality or provide me with a new philosophical outlook on existence. I don't need you to be a prophet or a sage. 

I just want you to write something beautiful.

I hated this.