The World Goes on

By László Krasznahorkai

Book Overview

In The World Goes On, a narrator first speaks directly, then narrates a number of unforgettable stories, and then bids farewell ("here I would leave this earth and these stars, because I would take nothing with me"). As L szl Krasznahorkai himself explains: "Each text is about drawing our attention away from this world, speeding our body toward annihilation, and immersing ourselves in a current of thought or a narrative..." A Hungarian interpreter obsessed with waterfalls, at the edge of the abyss in his own mind, wanders the chaotic streets of Shanghai. A traveler, reeling from the sights and sounds of Varanasi, India, encounters a giant of a man on the banks of the Ganges ranting on and on about the nature of a single drop of water. A child laborer in a Portuguese marble quarry wanders off from work one day into a surreal realm utterly alien from his daily toils. "The excitement of his writing," Adam Thirlwell proclaimed in The New York Review of Books, "is that he has come up with his own original forms--there is nothing else like it in contemporary literature."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811237516
• ISBN13: 9780811237512
• Release Date: April 2024
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Length: 311 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

masterful

this is one of the most all encompassing and totally enthralling books i’ve ever read.. it benefitted greatly from me savoring it as i read and it will be something i sit with for a long time. read it.