The first Laszlo Krasznahorkai book I ever purchased happened to be the first of his novels translated into English. I found it at a used-book store in St. Louis around the turn of the millennium. I knew nothing about the author, but dug the expressionist painting on the cover and the Susan Sontag quote on the back: the “Hungarian master of apocalypse.” And in light of the just-finished 2000 election, Krasznahorkai’s title — “The Melancholy of Resistance” — seemed to speak to some transnational condition.
The resonance would only grow in the decade to come. Forever wars, rising seas, a great recession — yet “The Melancholy of Resistance” (1989) stayed unread. Every few years I’d pick it up, fall in love with the opening lines, and then skip ahead, searching in vain for the end of the paragraph. As in his first novel, “Satantango” (1985), Krasznahorkai had forgone indentation altogether, yielding a great wall of words, a dense black lava-slide of type. The effect mirrored the paralysis of his characters, I thought, but was I really ready to commit to a novel without paragraph breaks? And back on the shelf it would go, further delaying one of the great reading experiences of my life.
Now, if I inform you that his new novel, “Herscht 07769,” consists of a single, book-length sentence, you may perhaps feel some of the same trepidation. On one level, Krasznahorkai’s formal experiment serves notice: The book is demanding, audacious, not necessarily one for the beach. But on another level — that of readerly pleasure — this description of form conveys very little, because a sentence isn’t just one thing. In the space of a few words, it can be aggregative or recursive, formal or conversational, or each of these by turns. At novel length, it might blossom into neurotic comedy, like Lucy Ellmann’s “Ducks, Newburyport,” or taper toward political thriller, like Mathias Énard’s “Zone,” or it might, like the last 20,000 words of “Ulysses,” suggest an unmediated revelation of character.
“Herscht 07769” blends all of these modes freely, in pursuit of something wholly its own. The protagonist is Florian Herscht, a hulking man-child living in the economically becalmed state of Thuringia, in what was once East Germany. By day, he works for the leader of a local neo-Nazi gang; together, he and “the Boss” scrub graffiti from the exteriors of buildings. But much of Florian’s time is spent roaming the little town of Kana, chatting up the citizens — librarian, cafe owner, the retired physicist who runs the weather station — who view him as a public charge. One neighbor refers to Florian as “the village idiot.” Says another: “He’s a good boy, this Florian, but I think that there’s something not right here.”
Case in point: As the novel opens, Florian has become fixated on a stray remark from the physicist, concerning the emergence of the universe from a single unpaired particle of matter. To Florian, the original decoupling from antimatter seems to imply, conversely, a nothing that might at any nanosecond return to swallow us all. “Everything teeters on this knife-edge of destruction,” he decides: “The apocalypse is now.”
Luckily, “now” is the 2010s, and the German chancellor is herself a physicist by training. Angela Merkel — “the epitome of stability, circumspection and reliability,” Florian thinks — will know what to do about the threat quantum mechanics poses to national (cosmic?) security. And so he begins writing her long letters, signed with his surname and postal code, “Herscht 07769.”
From this “Herzog”-ish premise follows everything and nothing. Whether the chancellor will swoop in to save the universe is an obvious red herring. Florian himself realizes partway through that his letters are “not worth even a farthing.” Moreover, one of the novel’s running jokes is that Florian (or his author) may have garbled the science. “You are mixing up two things, at least two things,” says the physicist, Herr Köhler.
But even as Köhler chides Florian, certain nearby disruptions — a rash of vandalism targeting historic sites linked to Bach, clashes between the Boss’s crew and local migrants, the reappearance of wolves in the hills around the town — raise the question of whether our hero’s “irresponsible despair” points to some deeper truth.
More even than plot, it’s the novel’s setting that unearths the catastrophe lurking inside the mundane, or vice versa. In his early books, Krasznahorkai created an almost mythic sense of rural stagnation under late Communist rule — a sort of Eastern Bloc Yoknapatawpha. The contemporary Europe evoked here is no less thoroughly corroded, notwithstanding 40 years of liberalization. Florian’s world is one where DHL competes with the postal service, and HP with Apple; where three-color pens and Jim Him raspberry soda and “409 different kinds of beer” can be bought on every corner; where the local amateur orchestra specializes not in the hometown maestro, Bach, but in “‘Dragonstone’ or ‘Blood of My Blood’ from ‘Game of Thrones.’”
Yet the opening of borders and markets has done little to promote a dynamic future. At moments, the right-wing grumblings of the Boss seem like corruptions of a legitimate complaint: “So much for the great unification, fundamentally nothing had changed, because fundamentally nothing ever changes.”
Here as elsewhere, the comma splice signals our entry into a peripheral character’s stream of consciousness. Krasznahorkai loves the sound of the mind talking to itself, and in “War & War” and the novella “Spadework for a Palace,” he uses parataxis to imprison us in the leaps and loops of a single consciousness. In “Herscht 07769,” as the narrative moves in and out of Florian’s point of view, we meet a whole panorama of people. There’s a cost to this: A sentence that can travel everywhere may communicate no particular need to be anywhere. But the cumulative effect is both propulsive and revelatory. The townspeople’s assorted obsessions — with pork chops, with Marx, with chrysanthemums, with the Beatles — at times feel like variations on a single melody, and at times like a dissonance that threatens the foundations of collective life. And that’s before the characters start turning up dead.
Still, the central driver of suspense remains the author’s aesthetic gamble, restricting himself across 400 pages to a single full stop. Is Krasznahorkai using style to convey something that the story alone can’t? And will he pull it off? Having persisted to the final period, I am happy to report that he is, and does.
In the abstract, his artistry may sound forbidding to all but the most devoted lovers of the European art novel. In concrete terms, though, Krasznahorkai’s work offers, to a degree rare in contemporary life, one of the central pleasures of fiction: an encounter with the otherness of other people. He’s a universalist cut loose from the shibboleths of humanism. And if “Herscht 07769” doesn’t quite reach the heights of his masterpieces — “The Melancholy of Resistance,” “War & War” and “Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming” — it may be the most accessible entry point so far to his visionary oeuvre.
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