War & War

By Lásló Krasznahorkai 

Translated by George Szirtes 

Published in English in 2006 by New Directions 

Originally published in 1999

Of the five Krasznahorkai novels I’ve read, I want to talk about this one. This is what I’d recommend if you haven’t read anything by LK, and if you have not read anything by him, I hope this review encourages you to do so because, in my opinion, he’s one of the best novelists that we’ve got. 

The overarching story is of a man, Korin, who has found an ancient and profound manuscript. He feels a burning need to travel from Hungary to New York to ultimately archive and upload this manuscript to the web, so that it will exist forever for all to see and appreciate. Why does he need to travel to the states? What misadventures happen to him after he arrives? The answers largely drive the narrative. But so too does the constant maniacal inner monologue, which eventually bleeds into the ancient manuscript’s narrative, forming the picture of a group of ancient warriors searching for a way home.

Krasznahorkai puts you inside the mind of Korin, with a constant stream of thought, thought revisions, obsessions, fears, and delusions. There is some relief in War & War that doesn’t exist in most of LK’s other works in the form of paragraph breaks, and it is partially why I think it’s a good entry into his body of work. I find him to be an adept, of sorts, of Thomas Bernhard, who I also love, and I think serves as a good-though-not-perfect comparison. 

There are also some modern touches that War & War uses to make its ultimate statement. The way that this is done is so great that it makes reading the book worth it for that final moment alone (well technically there’s a bit more story after). It’s not a narrative easily summarized because summary does not do justice to the style and skill on display, to the way that the narrative is presented. There are few writers who can do this kind of thing and make it enjoyable enough for the reader to want to continue. Part of what makes it work is that there’s humor among all the nihilistic musing, though that humor is of the absolute blackest kind.  

If anything above sounds interesting, even the slightest bit, I strongly encourage you to read this book. I’ll leave with a quote that I hope can do some of the heavy lifting for me: 

“Let the world be cursed, he declared, choking, a world in which there is neither Omnipotence nor Last Judgement, where curses, and any who pronounced them, were held up to ridicule, where glory could only be bought with trash. And above all, he said, curse the infernal mechanism of chance that upholds and maintains all this, and reveals it; curse even the light that by illuminating it exposes the fact that there are no worlds but this, that nothing else exists. But above even that, he said, curse humanity, curse mankind that enjoys control of the mechanism whereby it may reduce and falsify the essence of things and make that reduced and false essence the cornerstone of the deepest laws of our existence.” (275)

Heavy Lit rating: Highly Recommended  

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