War & War was less gripping, I thought, than Melancholy of Resistance, though that might just be about me: this one leaned a little too far towards self-obsessed-writer territory, which certainly can't be said about any of the other Krasznahorkai I've read. Here, a clerk reads a manuscript and decides it's so good that it must be put on the internet for all to read. We get the story of his going to New York, which he considers the center of the world, and also indirect description of the manuscript. I can't help thinking that the book was originally just the manuscript itself, and that Krasznahorkai ultimately decided that it needed a frame. He was probably right, though it is also enjoyable enough in its own right, with a typical Krasznahorkaian demonic type, and three more or less innocents, who keep bumping into each other at historically important moments: the end of the (I think) Minoan civilization; the discovery of the New World; Hadrianic Rome; and so on. He needed the frame to give these chapters a more definite shape.

As ever, the language is the main point, but the formal constraint (one sentence per section) really does work against the book. Whereas the long sentences in his earlier work are unintrusive, here you're constantly reminded that Krasznahorkai is a writer of long sentences. And the long sentences are too often too obviously just quite long sentence joined together with commas and conjunctions.

But the ideas are a little clearer here, in large part because the innocents in the MS are philosophically minded:

"...until Kasser picked up on the subject of pure love, that wholly pure love, the clear love, said Korin,a nd what was more, he added, the wholly pure love of which he spoke being resistence, the deepest and perhaps only noble form of revolt..."

And thanks to the frame-narrative structure, Krasznahorkai gets to have people comment on the MS with an obvious sense that they are also commenting on his own work:

"... the answer was right there in front of him all the time and he should have seen it, did in fact see it, and, furthermore, admired it, but had failed to understand it, failed to understand what he was looking at and admiring, meaning that the manuscript was interested in one thing only, and that was reality examined to the point of madness, and the experience of all those intense mad details, the engraving by sheer manic repetition of the matter into the imagination..."

"... once a sentence begin it doesn't want to stop, not because--let's put it this way--because it is about to fall off the edge of the world, not in other words as a result of incompetence, but because it is driven by some crazy form of rigor, as if its antithesis--the short sentence--led straight to hell..."

I do appreciate the characters-interpreting-texts bits, too. Nothing wrong with being explicit about what you're trying to do.

This edition also contains a short story, 'Isaiah has Come,' a kind of prequel to the novel. This is fine, but nowhere near as interesting as the novel itself, and, for some incomprehensible reason, has been typeset in a sans serif font that would make users of comic sans wince with embarrassment. ( )

Raczej nie. Pierwszy rozdział jeszcze się podobał, ale potem było źle, bardzo źle, coraz gorzej. ( )

A tale of monomania?
War & War is a book within a book. For the most part it's the story of Korin the archivist, a somewhat unhinged free spirit, who unearths a manuscript of startling truth and beauty. Korin wants to publish his find on the internet (to make it "eternal"), and so he travels to New York, which for him is "the centre of the world".

Throughout the novel Korin reveals the contents of the manuscript as he talks endlessly to whoever will listen. The manuscript itself - the book within the novel - tells of the world-hopping exploits of four time-travellers and a mysterious other named Mastermann.

I enjoyed the writing style (i.e. the author's use of long sentences): it captures Korin's enlightened but overloaded mind. - What's it about? The search for lasting meaning, perhaps? A futile attempt to secure immortality? The melancholy that results from realising that man (no matter how much he wants it) cannot go beyond conflict?...

All in all I'd define it as a pessimistic novel about the final days of a homeless soul whose chance discovery and obsession with a unique manuscript dooms him. Difficult and frustrating at times, though enjoyable because of the protagonist's spirited innocence. ( )

Συγκλονιστικο αριστουργημα ( )

There aren't many works of fiction I've read--not since childhood, anyway--that left me feeling that the characters, settings,and events were real. This one did, which is probably why I can't get its details out of my head nor altogether shrug off the sadness it aroused. You'd think that the device of using sometimes very long sentences (which are so beautifully constructed that even if you stop reading in the middle of one, you'll very easily find your place again) with innumerable clauses would distance the reader from what is related, but that's not at all the case here. I'm not sure how Krasznahorkai imparts so strong a sense of realness to his writing; he certainly doesn't take the obvious options like using description or dialogue to do so. Part of the effect might be due to the personalities of the main characters being displayed bit by bit and layer by layer: Korin, for example, is at first shown only as garrulous and obssessive, then quite pitiable and, gradually, becomes a learned and rather canny man who is in the end sympathetic rather than pathetic. And, in the end, the only thing that saved the book from being heart-breaking was the introduction of a few characters who also find Korin sympathetic enough to listen to.

There's a sort of epilogue, a closing section, to the book that I've a qualm or two about. Whilst its setting and happenings are wonderfully atmospheric, the tone and the content feel markedly different to what's gone before. The discrepancy doesn't exactly jar, but for me it momentarily blunted the impact of what preceded it. If I could somehow read War and War for the first time again knowing what I do now, I'd read the closing section before reading the rest of the book. And I most emphatically wouldn't have looked up the website mentioned until I'd reached the appropriate page.