The World Goes on
Description
In The World Goes On, a narrator first speaks directly, then tells eleven unforgettable stories, and then bids farewell ("for here I would leave this earth and these stars, because I would take nothing with me"). As László Krasznahoraki 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, encounters a giant of a man on the banks of the Ganges ranting on 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 World Goes On is another amazing masterpiece by the winner of the 2015 Man Booker International Prize. "The excitement of his writing," Adam Thirwell proclaimed in the New York Review of Books, "is that he has come up with this own original forms--there is nothing else like it in contemporary literature."Product Details
Price
$24.95
Publisher
New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publish Date
December 05, 2017
Pages
288
Dimensions
5.5 X 1.0 X 8.1 inches | 1.05 pounds
Language
English
Type
Hardcover
EAN/UPC
9780811224192
BISAC Categories:
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About the Author
The winner of the 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature and the 2015 Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement, László Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, Hungary.
John Batki is a kilimologist, writer, translator, and visual artist. He was born in Hungary and has lived in the United States since age fourteen.
George Szirtes (b. 1948) is an award-winning poet and translator who settled in England after his family fled the Hungarian Uprising of 1956.
Ottilie Mulzet was awarded the National Book Award for Translated Literature for her translation of László Krasznahorkai's Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming in 2019.
Reviews
The universality of Krasznahorkai's vision rivals that of Gogol's Dead Souls and far surpasses all the lesser concerns of contemporary writing.--W. G. Sebald
The spirit of James Joyce hovers over Krasznahorkai's pages, and Nietzsche is never far away, either; indeed, the German philosopher appears early on, breaking down into madness on witnessing a horse being whipped in a Turinese street. In philosophically charged prose, Krasznahorkai questions language, history, and what we take to be facts, all the while rocketing from one corner of the world to the next, from Budapest to Varanasi to Okinawa..--Kirkus"The World Goes On" (07/20/2017)
This book breaks all conventions and tests the very limits of language, resulting in a transcendent, astounding experience.
A masterpiece of invention--Claire Kohda Hazelton"The World Goes On review - a masterpiece of fear and futility" (11/15/2017)
Sly and elegant--Saul Anton
A treasure trove of 21 idiosyncratic stories. Endlessly intriguing.
A vision of painstaking beauty.
Krasznahorkai offers us stories that are relentlessly generative and defiantly irresolvable - haunting, pleasantly weird, and ultimately bigger than the worlds they inhabit.--Jacob Silverman
His work tends to get passed around like rare currency. One of the most profoundly unsettling experiences I have had as a reader.--James Wood
Krasznahorkai is the kind of writer who at least once on every page finds a perfect way of expressing something one has always sensed but never known, let alone been able to describe.--Nicole Krauss
The Hungarian master of the apocalypse.--Susan Sontag
A celebration of tiny moments of odd, inexplicable joy.
One begins a Krasznahorkai story like a free diver, with a deep inhalation before plunging in. His fiction is not faithful to literary convention, but it is faithful to life. The extended periods of quiescence, the isolated glimpses of the sublime, the portentous images signifying nothing, the mundane images signifying everything, the arbitrary eruptions of horror and beauty--though Krasznahorkai's technique relies upon artifice, the result is an honest, courageous, often harrowing portrait of a--Nathaniel Rich "The Storyteller Who Offers No Escape "
Laszlo Krasznahorkai does many fascinating things with his prose, and one of the most striking is [this]: Starting a sentence hopefully, trying to say this or that, and then traveling inexorably, one clause after another, to the bleak and totalizing conclusion that all is lost, nothing is real, the world is intolerable. Like Beckett, it's much funnier than you'd think.--Nitsuh Abebe
Krasznahorkai constantly pushes beyond the expected, escalating everything to the brink of deliriousness.--Idra Novey
One of the most mysterious artists now at work.--Colm Tóibín
I love Krasznahorkai's books. His long, meandering sentences enchant me, and even if his universe appears gloomy, we always experience that transcendence which to Nietzsche represented metaphysical consolation.--Imre Kertész
László Krasznahorkai is a visionary writer of extraordinary intensity and vocal range who captures the texture of present-day existence in scenes that are terrifying, strange, appallingly comic, and often shatteringly beautiful.--Marina Warner, (announcing the Man Booker International Prize)
A work that shows, undiminished, the complexity of existence...-- (01/29/2018)
The stories in The World Goes On are the reading equivalent of climbing a volcano instead of sitting by the beach on your honeymoon. But the rewards -- the sudden, knife-like insights so cerebral they seem the work of an alien intelligence -- are worth the effort.-- (12/08/2017)
Thought-provoking and meditative...From Russian cosmonauts to despairing bishops to beleaguered bankers, the threads of forsaking and being forsaken weave like a nervous system through dense, philosophical prose.-- (10/24/2017)
Krasznahorkai's fiction is apocalyptic in the original sense: concerned with the time when ordinary, blinkered perception gives way to revelation, when the veil is rent and we see things in their true and terrifying form. The World Goes On, a collection of 20 short stories plus a coda, serves as a wonderful primer to the 'invisible gigasystem' that is the Krasznahorkai universe.-- (11/24/2017)
The spirit of James Joyce hovers over Krasznahorkai's pages, and Nietzsche is never far away, either; indeed, the German philosopher appears early on, breaking down into madness on witnessing a horse being whipped in a Turinese street. In philosophically charged prose, Krasznahorkai questions language, history, and what we take to be facts, all the while rocketing from one corner of the world to the next, from Budapest to Varanasi to Okinawa..--Kirkus"The World Goes On" (07/20/2017)
This book breaks all conventions and tests the very limits of language, resulting in a transcendent, astounding experience.
A masterpiece of invention--Claire Kohda Hazelton"The World Goes On review - a masterpiece of fear and futility" (11/15/2017)
Sly and elegant--Saul Anton
A treasure trove of 21 idiosyncratic stories. Endlessly intriguing.
A vision of painstaking beauty.
Krasznahorkai offers us stories that are relentlessly generative and defiantly irresolvable - haunting, pleasantly weird, and ultimately bigger than the worlds they inhabit.--Jacob Silverman
His work tends to get passed around like rare currency. One of the most profoundly unsettling experiences I have had as a reader.--James Wood
Krasznahorkai is the kind of writer who at least once on every page finds a perfect way of expressing something one has always sensed but never known, let alone been able to describe.--Nicole Krauss
The Hungarian master of the apocalypse.--Susan Sontag
A celebration of tiny moments of odd, inexplicable joy.
One begins a Krasznahorkai story like a free diver, with a deep inhalation before plunging in. His fiction is not faithful to literary convention, but it is faithful to life. The extended periods of quiescence, the isolated glimpses of the sublime, the portentous images signifying nothing, the mundane images signifying everything, the arbitrary eruptions of horror and beauty--though Krasznahorkai's technique relies upon artifice, the result is an honest, courageous, often harrowing portrait of a--Nathaniel Rich "The Storyteller Who Offers No Escape "
Laszlo Krasznahorkai does many fascinating things with his prose, and one of the most striking is [this]: Starting a sentence hopefully, trying to say this or that, and then traveling inexorably, one clause after another, to the bleak and totalizing conclusion that all is lost, nothing is real, the world is intolerable. Like Beckett, it's much funnier than you'd think.--Nitsuh Abebe
Krasznahorkai constantly pushes beyond the expected, escalating everything to the brink of deliriousness.--Idra Novey
One of the most mysterious artists now at work.--Colm Tóibín
I love Krasznahorkai's books. His long, meandering sentences enchant me, and even if his universe appears gloomy, we always experience that transcendence which to Nietzsche represented metaphysical consolation.--Imre Kertész
László Krasznahorkai is a visionary writer of extraordinary intensity and vocal range who captures the texture of present-day existence in scenes that are terrifying, strange, appallingly comic, and often shatteringly beautiful.--Marina Warner, (announcing the Man Booker International Prize)
A work that shows, undiminished, the complexity of existence...-- (01/29/2018)
The stories in The World Goes On are the reading equivalent of climbing a volcano instead of sitting by the beach on your honeymoon. But the rewards -- the sudden, knife-like insights so cerebral they seem the work of an alien intelligence -- are worth the effort.-- (12/08/2017)
Thought-provoking and meditative...From Russian cosmonauts to despairing bishops to beleaguered bankers, the threads of forsaking and being forsaken weave like a nervous system through dense, philosophical prose.-- (10/24/2017)
Krasznahorkai's fiction is apocalyptic in the original sense: concerned with the time when ordinary, blinkered perception gives way to revelation, when the veil is rent and we see things in their true and terrifying form. The World Goes On, a collection of 20 short stories plus a coda, serves as a wonderful primer to the 'invisible gigasystem' that is the Krasznahorkai universe.-- (11/24/2017)
