True to form, Krasznahorkai’s latest collection of fiction is intentionally difficult, if less bleak than some of his vaguely apocalyptic novels. Laced with the dark, existential humor familiar to readers of Kafka and Samuel Beckett ... Make no mistake: Krasznahorkai is an avant-garde stylist with little interest in the traditional short stories we’re all familiar with from literary magazines. 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.

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.

This new collection of stories, like all of Krasznahorkai’s work, consists mostly of the searching, capacious sentences for which he has become known, each additional clause circling the unutterable … With impressive subtlety, the translations recreate the playful irony that undercuts the incessant anguish in each story, an anguish that can become predictable and therefore tiresome ... Krasznahorkai’s stories refuse to submit to the expectation that fiction provide any kind of reassurance or intimation of redemption. What the stories offer instead is a singular kind of immersive intensity in scenes flooded with such despair that reading them feels at times like drowning in the spiritual questions of our era.

The World Goes On, while it features an array of disheartening narratives, feels more like a celebration of tiny moments of odd, inexplicable joy ... There is a lot of wandering in The World Goes On. Men — and they do seem to always be men — get drunk and lost, get obsessed with conspiracy theories, paint women like valleys in an attempt to return to their own homes and mothers, and almost always monologue for pages and pages in endless run-on sentences. But there are moments of light and joy within the ramblings of these apparent madmen ... Reading The World Goes On is like accidentally getting on the wrong train — the writing style pulls you inexorably on, and you never quite know where you'll end up. Whether you want to stay on or get off remains your choice.

Insofar as a chapter-long sentence can be easy to follow, Krasznahorkai’s are. They offer us the sense of a mind in the ongoing rush of things, 'quibbling, twisting and turning, pushing and pulling it to move ahead,' constantly thinking and hoping and waiting but never coming to much of a resolution. The World Goes On serves as a wonderful primer to the 'invisible gigasystem' that is the Krasznahorkai universe. Though it’s not as consistently excellent as some of Krasznahorkai’s novels — Seiobo There Below remains his best — the shorter, discrete offerings, many seeming less stories than fevered mini-essays and thought experiments, give readers the chance to take a sip of this weird brew before deciding to drain an entire novel.

In reading this collection of 21 stories, I must begin by saying the author did something utterly profound to me as a reader. Krasznahorkai made time stop … The author describes the fullness met at death, and the beauty therein, as a kind of apparition on the page, and yet, he is still very much alive in a kind of willful jettisoning that is post-punk Krasznahorkai … I might call this author’s prose a form of literary calisthenics … The absence of women, particularly in a collection where the author had numerous choices to include the other half of the world’s perspective, leaves a deafening sadness.

The stories in The World Goes On, by the Hungarian magus László Krasznahorkai, rebel against a different ruling power, the totalitarian regime of individual consciousness … The key to Mr. Krasznahorkai’s sorcery is the run-on sentences that extend across dozens of pages, embodying the kind of demonic labyrinth in which his characters are trapped yet also achieving an incantatory catharsis that liberates one, however fleetingly, from the prison of self-awareness. John Batki has provided translations for the bulk of the stories, joined for the remainder by Ottilie Mulzet and George Szirtes. The trio’s work is astonishing.

The World Goes On begins with a series of short pieces that are closer to philosophical salvos than to narratives, but many of the stories that follow offer similarly tantalizing lures ... Yet hidden within these dense thickets of prose are sublime, often uncanny visions ... The eeriness of Krasznahorkai’s best work derives from its dogged hostilities to resolution, revelation, symbolism, parable, narrative clarity, character development. 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 civilization in drift and decline. His dreary worlds are familiar, and the recognition of that familiarity is unsettling: We don’t like to acknowledge the meaninglessness of our lives. Most fiction is essentially escapist, allowing the reader passage to distant worlds or to the even more distant territory of the inner self. Krasznahorkai offers no escape. He writes fairy tales without morals, jokes without punch lines. They are designed to appeal to two kinds of readers: those with a good sense of humor, and those with none.

The World Goes On is an achievement, but not standard literary fare. Krasznahorkai nimbly maps the climate of modern obsession and languor, approaches his peculiar brand of storytelling with philosophical, psychological, and emotional nuance ... In a literary landscape sometimes over-reliant on motion and plot, Krasznahorkai pauses to consider the actual mechanics of motion, its directions, the components of its moving, the traveler’s relation to the mover. He almost never names his travelers, though, and never deigns to give them a home.

In the end, the storyteller bids farewell and departs into eternity, leaving readers to puzzle over the parables, dialogues, and tales. This book breaks all conventions and tests the very limits of language, resulting in a transcendent, astounding experience.

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 dense, 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 and Okinawa, all places eminently worthy of being left behind. Complex and difficult, as are all of Krasznahorkai’s works, but worth sticking with.