László Krasznahorkai, Trans. by George Szirtes, Ottilie Mulzet & John Batki
Positive4Columns\"Krasznahorkai’s sentences are rooted in his conviction that prose should model itself more on how the mind actually works—that is, as an ongoing flow that restates, returns, repeats, jumps from memory to memory, and from present to past to future and back again. Of course, Marcel Proust also comes to mind. The Hungarian writer clearly shares his tendency to move between events and memories, past and present, in long, looping sentences. But Proust never denies his readers a stable fictional world to retreat to in case they lose the thread of the writing and need to regroup. Krasznahorkai’s epic sentences, by contrast, often pointedly shake, if never entirely destroy, this stable fictional foundation. And they offer few places where a reader can pause to digest what they have read. This is literature as endurance trial ... It’s a high-culture gauntlet thrown down in the face of the creeping notion—and anxiety—that literature should model itself on information. Krasznahorkai’s vast sentences resist summation. Their obtuse materiality makes it impossible to treat them as indifferent carriers of a message. Carefully hewn, they blur the line between poetry and prose, infusing the latter with the intensity and aesthetic power of the former. This certainly tests one’s patience—not to mention our social media-truncated attention spans. But the combination of their technical brilliance and ironic intelligence is disarming. Our overly market-driven literary scene often flatters its audiences rather than asking them to think. Krasznahorkai makes a compelling case for literature that demands effort. Prose needn’t always go down like water. Sometimes, a good stiff drink is in order.\
