Három találkozás a könyvvel, kronológiai sorrendben.

1.) Fizikai paramétereit tekintve ez a kiadvány akkora, hogy ha egy kisebb szobában kinyitod, akkor a szobában tartózkodók már nem férnek el melletted. Szóval nem tömegközlekedésre való, de még ágyba se nagyon ajánlanám.
2.) Kinyitás után először a fotókat böngésztem át. A Villa Negra művészeti csoport alkotásai között a szobrok vannak túlsúlyban. No már most egy háromdimenziós művészeti alkotást két dimenzióban interpretálni mindig kihívás, de érzésem szerint a fényképész(ek) jól oldottá(k) meg a feladatot: végig érezni a tárgyak térbeliségét. Amúgy jó kis dolgok ezek, lehet rajtuk mélázni, van bennük valami megnyugtató – külön kiemelném, hogy ezeknek a szobroknak olyan gusztusos felülete van, én biztos összetaperolnám őket.
3.) A szöveg. Horváth Viktor a Török tükörrel robbant be az irodalmi köztudatba, amivel szépen betöltött egy lyukat a honi piacon: a jól olvasható, misztikus-fifikás, irodalmi minőségű történelmi regényét. Aztán jött tőle A Kis Reccs, ami már más tészta. Nekem ugyan nagyon tetszett, mert bátor, kreatív és egyéni kísérlet (igaz, enyhén túlhúzva), de általában véve hidegen fogadták. No, ezzel a kisregénnyel Horváth ezt a vonalat vitte tovább, abszolút következetesen és betyár módon kiélezve. Úgy nevezném én el ezt a műfajt, hogy pszichedelikus poszthumán posztmodern. A magyar szépirodalomban nincs számottevő előképe – még leginkább Szorokinhoz lehetne hasonlítani, de érzésem szerint valamivel tudatosabban építi rá a szemre hallucinogén anyagok hatása alatt írt szöveget egy nagyon is direkt írói elképzelésre. (Még ha ez az írói elképzelés olyan massza is, ami azért bőven megengedi az olvasatokat.) Én megértem egyesek negatív viszonyulását a könyvhöz a tekintetben, hogy ez a szöveg olyan drámaian mondja fel az olvasóval kötött hagyományos írói szerződéseket, amit tényleg nem könnyű tolerálni (és hangsúlyozom: nem is muszáj tolerálni). Ezt a kisregényt (azt hiszem) nem kell, nem lehet megérteni: át kell szűrni magunkon, aztán lesz, ami lesz. A magam részéről lenyűgözőnek találom ezt a nyakig érő kását, amivel Horváth meglepett. Amúgy ez a kása első pillantásra úgy fest, nem sok ponton kapcsolódik a képekhez – de olvasás közben folyamatosan éreztem, hogy maguk a műtárgyak jelentése is átalakul a mondatok hatására. Akár tudatos, akár nem, piros pont érte.

És még sok ilyen társművészeti kiadványt kérek szépen, mondanom sem kell. ( )

A book that reveals new facets of our human experience. Yet, not the author's best work. ( )

A collection of short pieces with a distinctly Kafka/Borges feel about them - stories, philosophical essays, or something in between the two - which all seem to revolve one way or another around the idea of the futility of human wisdom. A succession of characters believe they have found a fundamental truth about the world, god, or humanity, but it never comes to anything - either it sends them mad, or they take to drink, or no-one pays any attention to their idea, or it’s an obvious delusion to start with.

I normally like this sort of thing - there’s quite a bit of mind-bending involved, and there’s a wide range of styles and techniques on offer, from a two-sentence essay on Heraclitus to a story in 79 empty paragraphs (14 blank pages) about Istanbul, which we stand little chance of reconstructing from the deliberately elusive footnotes. But somehow it didn’t work for me - it just felt like a lot of empty posturing. Maybe I wasn’t reading it in the right mood, maybe there’s something wrong with the translation, or maybe the author is just a little bit too sure of himself. But it was interesting enough to finish, so I’m not dismissing it out of hand. ( )

What's Wrong with Krasznahorkai

I seem to be one of a very few people who do not value Krasznahorkai's fiction. His work is a lesson in how treacherous it is to keep Kafka too much in mind while you're writing; and in recent years he's also a lesson in why it's sometimes a good idea to keep fame at a distance, because his writing is increasingly not so much breathtakingly long in its thoughts and sentences, as simply diffuse. Here I complain briefly about a half-dozen stories in the collection, and then, under number (2), quote one of the essays in its entirety and complain about it at more length.

1.

The first piece, "Wandering-Standing," is a pastiche of one of Kafka's parables or Beckett's scenes, with too many ideas, each one of them a cliche. (The man torn in two directions, holding a heavy suitcase in each hand.)

The second, "On Velocity," is about a man who tries to walk faster than the Earth spins, in order to escape from thought itself, "because the Earth is thought." First he walks West, which is wrong, because he's jus subtracting a little from Earth's rotation; then East, which works; and finally he walks, because he realizes it doesn't matter if he runs or not. The problem is that these three decisions are very simple. I was ahead of him on each one, reading fast to see how long it would take Krasznahorkai's narrator to get there. It's not good to have the reader's thoughts ahead of the narrator's when the theme of the piece is moving thought faster than the Earth. (Note this is not an intended irony.)

The third, "He Wants to Forget," toys weakly with existentialism: "weakly" because it glances off ideas better developed in existentialist literature.

The fourth, "How Lovely," is feeble-minded, in the sense that he doesn't think through his own premise, which is a conference on the idea of area, which is predicated on the non-existence and yet pervasive necessity of area (space). This could be developed (I think of Cesar Aira here, who could have made it into another literary conference), but here it isn't.

Fifth: "At the Latest, in Turin": this is a simple answer to Thomas Mann's reading of the story of Nietzsche's collapse (that the philosopher of the amoral succumbed to moral feeling). It's nearly a three-page philosophy essay, but it's bogged down by irrelevant literary metaphors ("by now we are gliding among the buoys that mark the harbor..." etc.).

Seventh is "Universal Theseus," which is cast as a lecture series. The first one recapitulates the story of the arrival of a sinister caravan, told in "The Melancholy of Resistance." The moral here is necessarily simpler than in that book: Krasznahorkai actually draws a conclusion ("melancholy is the most enigmatic of attractions") and proposes three sources of melancholy (pp. 39-40), which is not problematic in the context of a ten-page essay -- but this ruins part of "The Melancholy of Resistance" in retrospect, because it reveals a simple idea underneath the long novel.

2.

Reviewers have singled out a one-page essay called "Not on the Heraclitean Path" for special praise. It is just two sentences in John Bakti's translation:

"NOT ON THE HERACLEITEAN PATH

"Memory is the art of forgetting.
"It doesn’t deal with reality, reality is not what engages it, it has no substantial relation whatsoever to that inexpressible, infinite complexity that is reality itself, in the same way and to the same extent that we ourselves are unable to reach the point where we can catch even a glimpse of this indescribable, infinite complexity (for reality and glimpsing it are one and the same); so the rememberer covers the same distance to the past about to be evoked as that covered when this past had been present, thereby revealing that there had never been a connection to reality, and this connection had never been desired, since regardless of the horror or beauty that the memory evokes, the rememberer always works starting from the essence of the image about to be evoked, an essence that has no reality, and not even starting from a mistake, for he fails to recall reality not by making a mistake, but because he handles what is complex in the loosest and most arbitrary manner, by infinitely simplifying the infinitely complex to arrive at something relative to which he has a certain distance, and this is how memory is sweet, this is how memory is dazzling, and this is how memory comes to be heartrending and enchanting, for here you stand, in the midst of an in nite and inconceivable complexity, you stand here utterly dumbfounded, helpless, clueless, and lost, holding the infinite simplicity of the memory in your hand—plus of course the devastating tenderness of melancholy, for you sense, as you hold this memory, that its reality lies somewhere in the heartless, sober, ice-cold distance." (p. 95)

For examples of reviewers' praise of this see Joslyn Allen in Chronic Bibliophilia, and Nicky Loomis in the Los Angeles Review of Books; both quote this in its entirety. Loomis's praise is typical in the way she sets Krasznahorkai against the Attention Deficit Disorder of contemporary screen addiction: "So here goes 'Not on the Heraclitean Path' in its entirety," she writes. "I encourage you to read Krasznahorkai with no distraction. If you are on a train, do not look out the window mid-sentence. If you are on your computer, do not check your email. Do not take a bite of a sandwich. Ignore loved ones. And for god’s sake, turn off the news."

It is a beautifully paced sentence in English. But surely it isn't churlish to note that in crucial ways it doesn't make sense. The opening short sentence, for example, is not argued in the second long sentence: forgetting is not what is at stake, according to that longer sentence. The title, too, doesn't apply because the second sentence is about arriving at "a certain distance" from life, not re-arriving at the same destinations, as in Heraclitus's fragment.

Krasznahorkai says "the rememberer covers the same distance to the past about to be evoked as that covered when this past had been present." It's a clear trope, but it doesn't make sense in the logic of the essay itself. Why should the distance be the same? If "there had never been a connection to reality" in the initial experience, how could there have been a sense of traveling toward an essence that was in anyway comparable to what Proust would have called "voluntary memory"? As Nabokov's Van Veen would have said in "Ada, Or Ardor," the texture of time has been advanced over the mechanics of memory.

Even if we accept this -- as the ongoing motion of the sentence requires -- it doesn't make sense to then assert that "this connection had never been desired." It had, by the logic of the remaining half of the sentence.

I really don't want to sound like one of those carping ultra-rationalists who populate the TLS Letters to the Editor: I only want to say that the two sentences themselves ask to be read as a series of logical propositions. They're structured that way. Nothing in the text itself suggests that the essay is only, or even largely, a formal or abstract gesture or an attempt to evoke ideas by assembling evocative non-logical parts. "Not on the Heraclitean Path" is a schematic philosophy, like most of the essays in this collection, like most of Krasznahorkai I've read, and as such it needs to stop relying on its prosody for free passes into a realm of supposed poetry.