The Melancholy Of Resistance László Krasznahorkai

The Melancholy Of Resistance László Krasznahorkai

Overview:

A powerful, surreal novel, in the tradition of Gogol, about the chaotic events surrounding the arrival of a circus in a small Hungarian town. The Melancholy of Resistance, László Krasznahorkai's magisterial, surreal novel, depicts a chain of mysterious events in a small Hungarian town. A circus, promising to display the stuffed body of the largest whale in the world, arrives in the dead of winter, prompting bizarre rumors. Word spreads that the circus folk have a sinister purpose in mind, and the frightened citizens cling to any manifestation of order they can find music, cosmology, fascism. The novel's characters are unforgettable: the evil Mrs. Eszter, plotting her takeover of the town; her weakling husband; and Valuska, our hapless hero with his head in the clouds, who is the tender center of the book, the only pure and noble soul to be found. Compact, powerful and intense, The Melancholy of Resistance, as its enormously gifted translator George Szirtes puts it, "is a slow lava flow of narrative, a vast black river of type." And yet, miraculously, the novel, in the words of The Guardian, "lifts the reader along in lunar leaps and bounds."

The Melancholy of Resistance doesn't so much clear up the mystery of Bela Tarr's haunting film Werckmeister Harmonies, as much as add to the complexity of the ideas explored in both. For a book and film to echo each other in such an enigmatic way is striking. While the film is frightening and devastating on a gut level, The Melancholy of Resistance is, on an intellectual level, more frightening and utterly devastating...until the end, the very end, the last two pages in fact. And they aren't a sleight of hand magic or clever plot twist, but a cold look at plain facts as if someone turned on the light suddenly and no ghosts were there. The ending certainly qualifies the book but voids nothing at all. If anything, it prompts a second reading.

The novel is written from four different points of view, that of Janos Valuska, Mrs. Plauf (Janos's mother), Eszter and Mrs. Eszter (Aunt Tunde), and skirts themes of chaos/order, Nazism, Sovietism, atheism, and their teeter-totter through history. Krasznahorkai's faulknerian sentences are like a wind at the back of a raging fire, yet there are so many conversational, almost comic asides (and maybe this is due in some part to the translation) that the effect is like being in a speeding car. Very enjoyable if you don't drive over the cliff.

“The universality of its vision rivals that of Gogol's Dead Souls.” (W. G. Sebald )

“An inexorable, visionary book by the contemporary Hungarian master of apocalypse who inspires comparison with Gogol and Melville.” (Susan Sontag )

“ While that was an extraordinary movie, the book surpasses it in depth and nuance. ”

ENJOYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!

And Blessed Are The Ones Who Care For Their Fellow Men!