This new collection of stories, like all of Krasznahorkai's work, consists mostly of the searching, capacious sentences for which he has become known, each additional clause circling the unutterable like "a merry-go-round, around the thing itself," as the narrator of "Obstacle Theory" states…Krasznahorkai constantly pushes beyond the expected, escalating everything to the brink of deliriousness…Krasznahorkai's stories refuse to submit to the expectation that fiction provide any kind of reassurance or intimation of redemption. What the stories offer instead is a singular kind of immersive intensity in scenes flooded with such despair that reading them feels at times like drowning in the spiritual questions of our era.
The New York Times Book Review - Idra Novey
★ 09/04/2017
"I love Krasznahorkai's books. His long, meandering sentences enchant me, and even if his universe appears gloomy, we always experience that transcendence which to Nietzsche represented metaphysical consolation."
"Sly and elegant"
"Laszlo Krasznahorkai does many fascinating things with his prose, and one of the most striking is [this]: Starting a sentence hopefully, trying to say this or that, and then traveling inexorably, one clause after another, to the bleak and totalizing conclusion that all is lost, nothing is real, the world is intolerable. Like Beckett, it’s much funnier than you’d think."
NYT Magazine - Nitsuh Abebe
"A work that shows, undiminished, the complexity of existence..."
The New Yorker - Briefly Noted
"Thought-provoking and meditative...From Russian cosmonauts to despairing bishops to beleaguered bankers, the threads of forsaking and being forsaken weave like a nervous system through dense, philosophical prose."
8 New Books You Need to Read in Novemeber - Harper's Bazaar - Lauren Hubbard
"A masterpiece of invention"
The World Goes On review – a masterpiece of fear and futility - The Guardian - Claire Kohda Hazelton
"The stories in The World Goes On are the reading equivalent of climbing a volcano instead of sitting by the beach on your honeymoon. But the rewards — the sudden, knife-like insights so cerebral they seem the work of an alien intelligence — are worth the effort."
The Star Tribune - Adam Morgan
"Krasznahorkai brings elements of Gogol, Bulgakov, Beckett and Bernhard to inimitable, always sympathetic fictions that provoke, entertain and often move us. Over twenty-one stories in The World Goes On ...Krasznahorkai's epic sentences show how, in reality, human thought and speech never fully stop, they merely pause. Deeply resonant."
"Krasznahorkai's fiction is apocalyptic in the original sense: concerned with the time when ordinary, blinkered perception gives way to revelation, when the veil is rent and we see things in their true and terrifying form. The World Goes On, a collection of 20 short stories plus a coda, serves as a wonderful primer to the 'invisible gigasystem' that is the Krasznahorkai universe."
Pulling back the curtain and finding nothing - The Boston Globe - Anthony Domestico
"One of the most mysterious artists now at work."
"One begins a Krasznahorkai story like a free diver, with a deep inhalation before plunging in. His fiction is not faithful to literary convention, but it is faithful to life. The extended periods of quiescence, the isolated glimpses of the sublime, the portentous images signifying nothing, the mundane images signifying everything, the arbitrary eruptions of horror and beauty—though Krasznahorkai’s technique relies upon artifice, the result is an honest, courageous, often harrowing portrait of a civilization in drift and decline"
The Atlantic - Nathaniel Rich
"Krasznahorkai constantly pushes beyond the expected, escalating everything to the brink of deliriousness."
"Krasznahorkai offers us stories that are relentlessly generative and defiantly irresolvable - haunting, pleasantly weird, and ultimately bigger than the worlds they inhabit."
The New York Times - Jacob Silverman
"His work tends to get passed around like rare currency. One of the most profoundly unsettling experiences I have had as a reader."
The New Yorker - James Wood
"Krasznahorkai is the kind of writer who at least once on every page finds a perfect way of expressing something one has always sensed but never known, let alone been able to describe."
"The World Goes On doesn’t comfort you, but it does reward readerly cathexis with big, gorgeous gestures."
"The universality of Krasznahorkai’s vision rivals that of Gogol’s Dead Souls and far surpasses all the lesser concerns of contemporary writing."
"Our current condition of displacement, says László Krasznahorkai in The World Goes On , cannot be told; only with great difficulty can language be budged out of endless spirallings of frustration. But then the collection goes on to offer stories of journeys that, whether undertaken or thwarted, arrive at transcendence. At the end there is only one way to go, in what has to be the most powerful page written so far this century."
"László Krasznahorkai is a visionary writer of extraordinary intensity and vocal range who captures the texture of present-day existence in scenes that are terrifying, strange, appallingly comic, and often shatteringly beautiful."
"The Hungarian master of the apocalypse."
"Our current condition of displacement, says László Krasznahorkai in The World Goes On (New Directions), cannot be told; only with great difficulty can language be budged out of endless spirallings of frustration. But then the collection goes on to offer stories of journeys that, whether undertaken or thwarted, arrive at transcendence. At the end there is only one way to go, in what has to be the most powerful page written so far this century."
Times Literary Supplement
"Russian cosmonauts, a waterfall-obsessed interpreter in Shanghai teetering on the edge of sanity, and a Portuguese child laborer who escapes his toils by wandering into an alternate reality ...The World Goes On [is] a philosophically-charged new collection of stories about characters that are being pushed (figuratively or literally) to the edges of the world."
"A vision of painstaking beauty."
"A treasure trove of 21 idiosyncratic stories. Endlessly intriguing."
2017-07-17
