A novel of awesome beauty and power by the Hungarian master, Laszla
Krasznahorkai. Winner of a 2005 PEN Translation Fund Award.
War and War, Laszla Krasznahorkai's second novel in English from New
Directions, begins at a point of danger: on a dark train platform Korim
is on the verge of being attacked by thuggish teenagers and robbed; and
from here, we are carried along by the insistent voice of this nervous
clerk. Desperate, at times almost mad, but also keenly empathic, Korim
has discovered in a small Hungarian town's archives an antique
manuscript of startling beauty: it narrates the epic tale of
brothers-in-arms struggling to return home from a disastrous war. Korim
is determined to do away with himself, but before he can commit suicide,
he feels he must escape to New York with the precious manuscript and
commit it to eternity by typing it all on the world-wide web. Following
Korim with obsessive realism through the streets of New York (from his
landing in a Bowery flophouse to his moving far uptown with a mad
interpreter), War and War relates his encounters with a fascinating
range of humanity, a world torn between viciousness and mysterious
beauty. Following the eight chapters of War and War is a short
"prequel acting as a sequel," "Isaiah," which brings us to a dark bar,
years before in Hungary, where Korim rants against the world and
threatens suicide. Written like nothing else (turning single sentences
into chapters), War and War affirms W. G. Sebald's comment that
Krasznahorkai's prose "far surpasses all the lesser concerns of
contemporary writing."
