think this blog is retired/dead for now !

The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai

TITLE: The Melancholy of Resistance
AUTHOR: László Krasznahorkai
READ: January - February
THOUGHTS: I don't even know where to start with this book. This is the third time I've tried to sit down and write something about it but have felt totally incapable. It took me a month to read its 314 pages. This is one of the heaviest, most unremittingly bleak and powerful books I have ever read. I remember watching The Werckmeister Harmonies when I was 17 or 18 and feeling like it was probably one of my favorite movies. I feel similarly to this book. The writing itself is very intense, very beautiful (in a very devastating-not-pretty way), and is seemingly spiritually traversing both the refuse that litters the earth and the possibility of reaching into some sort of black hole that is both very far away and surprisingly/not-surprisingly very near. Talking about this book makes me very hyperbolic. The first time I tried to write about it I used four separate ocean-related metaphors unconsciously -- which makes me think that this books creates the need to use a specific form of language to even begin to access a way to speak about it. The Sebald blurb on the book sez (and it couldn't be said better): "This is a book about a world into which the Leviathan has returned. The universality of its vision rivals that of Gogol's Dead Souls and far surpasses all the lesser concerns of contemporary writing." This book deserves much more than this silly little write up, but at the moment I still feel like I can't say anything. Reading this book (and alternately writing about it) feels like standing very close to an insurmountable brick wall, slowly crumbling, large pieces of cement threatening to leave a large gash or crater on your skull. I will ruin the book's last sentence, which is preceded by the (very precise/exacting) description of the decomposition of a body: "It ground the empire into carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and sulphur, it took its delicate fibers and unstitched them till they dispersed and had ceased to exist, because they had been consumed by the force of some incomprehensible distant edict, which must also consume this book, here, now, at the full stop, after the last word."