Seiobo There Below by László Krasznahorkai

 

    Just a page or two into the first chapter of Seiobo There Below, the 2008 novel by László Krasznahorkai I was stunned in a way that reduced me to cliches: the hair on the back of my neck stood up; my breath was taken away; I left my body. These cliches, as is almost never the case, describe my actual experience of reading the beginning of this book: an account of a crane standing in Kyoto's Kamo River waiting for a fish. Every other chapter, every other page, is equally good.

The plot—the crane never moves—is not what pulls us along. Krasznahorkai's long, cascading sentences, where only the odd semi-colon provides readers with a place to rest, are what does it. These sentences (no account of his writing fails to mention them) let us see that stillness is as compelling as the frenetic nonsense with which too many novelists (to say nothing of film-makers) concern themselves. 

Krasznahorkai employed the same style in earlier, equally brilliant, works such as Satantango, The Melancholy of Resistance, War and War, and Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming but those novels, mired in communist and post-communist Hungary, are, except for odd flashes of humor, unrelentingly dark. Seiobo, expands the range of experiences Krasznahorkai's exquisite prose gives us to include the kind of awe I describe above. 

The account of the crane standing in the Kamo River is just the first of seventeen chapters. There is no through line linking that chapter to the sixteen that follow except for a recurring theme, aesthetic experience: how art is in the world. Neither are there contrived epiphanies at the end of his tales, but the endings are always exactly right.

One is grateful that this novel, Krasznahorkai's art, is in the world, and also that the Nobel Prize should mean that more of his work will be brought into English. We have enough writers satisfied to produce competent fiction that is pleasant, diverting, and easy to read. Krasznahorkai does more than that. He reminds us what art is for.