László Krasznahorkai
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Language
English
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"Set in contemporary times, Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming tells the story of a Prince Myshkin-like figure, Baron Bela Wenckheim, who decides to return at the end of his life to the provincial Hungarian town of his birth. Having escaped from his many casino debts in Buenos Aires, where he was living in exile, he wishes to be reunited with his high school sweetheart Marika. What follows is an endless storm of gossip, con men, and local politicians, vividly...
Author
Language
English
Description
Krasznahorkai in a maddening nutshell, The Last Wolf features a classic obsessed narrator, a man hired (by mistake) to write the true tale of the last wolf in Spain. It is narrated--all in a single sentence--as a sad looping tale, a howl more or less, in a dreary Berlin bar to a patently bored bartender. In Herman, a "peerless virtuoso of trapping" is hired to clear a forest's last "noxious beasts." Herman begins with great zeal, but then, suspecting...
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English
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"Spadework for a Palace bears the subtitle "Entering the Madness of Others" and offers an epigraph: "Reality is no obstacle." Indeed. This high-octane obsessive rant vaults over all obstacles, fueled by the idées fixe of a "gray little librarian" with fallen arches whose name-mr herman melvill-is merely one of the coincidences binding him to his lodestar Herman Melville ("I too resided on East 26th Street...I, too, had worked for a while at the...
Author
Language
English
Description
Destruction and Sorrow beneath the Heavens is both a travel memoir and the chronicle of a distinct intellectual shift as one of the most captivating contemporary writers and thinkers begins to engage with the cultures of Asia and the legacies of its interactions with Europe in a newly globalized society. Rendered in English by award-winning translator Ottilie Mulzet, Destruction and Sorrow beneath the Heavens is an important work, marking the emergence...
Language
English
Description
Lonely railway worker Maloin leads a simple, humdrum life with his teenage daughter and high-strung wife at the edge of an infinite sea. He barely notices the world around him, and has already accepted its slow and inevitable deterioration. His inner life is suddenly thrown into chaos after he stumbles upon a deadly business transaction that leaves him with a money-stuffed suitcase and guilty conscience for a crime he didn't commit.