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War and War seemed to be the world; those sentences stretched to catch the wind coming of every moment, from every direction or, maybe forming densely marked butcher paper charts detailing the full studied genome of one atomized part of a thing, tacked up next to the next one, just as dense, so involved you get with their density that when one of the sentences clocks in at a breezy hundred words, it feels like a period, a road sign, a jolt. Either way, it was a world in a blink of an eye, an old man being accosted on a bridge, accosted in that history-is-still-warm manner of Easter European books, the assimilation of systemic failure acted out among grand storied architecture. I hoped this scene would use up the whole book, use up the guy on the bridge, the author, the reader, everything but whatever polluted Hungarian waterway that ran underfoot having been witness to countless little tyrannies just like it before. But, things started to happen, it turned into a story of something like a story, and that's where I got lost. I think it's because I'm not much of a follower, I'm one of those deluded types that needs to believe I am the one cutting the trail through the thicket, and with most books, even the gnarlier of contemporary word warrens drained of love and life and feeling and even motion of plot and punctuation and everything, I can still Lewis and Clark it through the thing. But not this book. I asked the friend that suggested it to me, so, where was he in the end? What exactly happened between the translator and that sad woman in the apartment? Was that the same woman who... But it was like we read different books. She planted her hiking stick in the interior story, the one that Korin, the guy on the bridge, came to New York to type into a website? It seemed like a good story, but I wondered why it was there. It reminded me of reading the repeated, updated political tracts in Orwell's 1984, years ago in high school (in 1984, actually); I got that documents are the deliverable of politics and through those papers are the ideas of civilization filtered and sieves, but do they really need to be there? Isn't the real story on the surface? I thought I had it when Korin passed a display of priceless diamonds at the airport, a compression of facets that is as valuable a thing that exists, surrounded by guards right there in the open. War and War is likely about more than facets, angles through which the shared light is refracted and bent into a pure beam, one that cuts through dust and gas and whatever is in the air, or is the air, but whatever else it's about must be viewed through one of those facets in which I failed to peer. I still loved it, either way. His spiraling, endless sentences bore the genius touch of Beckett and Faulkner, but without the former's aridity and the latter's gush of blood. They were those beams of light, tightroping off to some point at the limit of our consciousness, taught rope bridges across misty chasms. Zip lines to the vanishing point. And, unlike B. and F., fun to read! War and War is a syntactic, grammatical, and lyrical singularity. It's a hoot. I still think I might have been right about the diamond/facet thing. Korin makes his way to a Mario Merz museum somewhere and requests to go in one of the sculptures. Merz was a key practitioner in arte povera, an Italian movement in the 60s dedicated to manifesting their humanity in new, ways, like every movement I guess. Merz built igloos, rickety gorgeous domes composed of little more than frameworks of twigs, sometimes complicated things with neon and tarps and who knows what else. To sit inside one would, I imagine, be quite the art thrill, a means tone at the center of a diamond, to be the locus of all those angles and planes that give the diamond it's cheesy luster and ultimately, its value. You would become the light from within the work. I'm not giving it away to say that near its conclusion, you are confronted with a giant black rectangle filling most of a page. I stared into that black rectangle until I couldn’t anymore, hoping this density would unravel in a nice, array where I could “oh” and “ah” and “I see” but it never came because it never does anyway and you read books like War and War to confront the void and boom, there it is! http://www.krasznahorkai.hu

2020-10-13 02:46