Anna's Reviews > Háború és háború

Skyscrapers and the Mystery of Existence

This urgent, neurotic, impenetrable narrative is a story of everything, where everything is the intersection of the horizontal scope of life and its vertical depth/height. There is existential despair, purpose as obsession, a brief history of mankind, the difficulties and urge of writing, breakdown in human communication.

Plot-wise, there is not much more to the story than what the blurb summarizes for us. The opening chapter evokes familiar motifs. As in Krasznahorkai’s Theseus-általános (The Universal Theseus), the lead character here is a storyteller. The narrative he tells is embedded and braided with the narrative told about him. Korin speaks constantly: he must share his story, to anyone who listens and even to those who don’t listen. Speech becomes a remedy against fear and against meaninglessness.

His transcription and digitization of the magical manuscript give us insight into the pains of writing. Writing, as an urgent, irresistible creative undertaking, is a matter of life and death. As is everything in this novel. Writing is recording: it is a mission entrusted to the writer as an agent. It is also storytelling: creating reality. It is also communication: Korin shares it with the interpreter’s mistress in the kitchen. In a heartbreaking scene, an aloof and unhinged Korin talks about bad periods, turning points, hope, while the abused woman cries silently, understanding only the key words Korin inserts in his monologue in English. There’s a fascinating companionship between Korin and the woman who doesn't understand his words, but still perceives something of what he says.

Seeing Korin as representative of humanity, as I did, leads to uncomfortable conclusions. He experiences existential rupture both outside, in his relationships, and inside, in his self. He is in a place of absurdity, and his sole attachment to life is his big project. His obsession is grotesque, but even scarier is how we, “the normal people”, also often believe that our lives need just that one great achievement to be complete. His sole purpose is to deliver the manuscript to eternity. As the volume grows in eternity, i.e. on the internet, so his days become shorter. What a terrifying and magnificent image this is: as our days become shorter here, our participation in eternity (the good we build into our persons) grows. Ideally.

Krasznahorkai is not a moralist, he doesn’t examine choices. Instead, he probes into the raw dimension of existence, that is beyond (or before?) the luxury of choice. War is a prime challenge of being. However, it is not the specific wars that he looks at, but the greatest war of all: that waged on the pointlessness of existence. The novel is an attempt at understanding war with the means of literature. By making its subject another writing and not merely a medieval plot intertwined with a present-time story, this book is also a meta-understanding, a look at how literature understands war. Korin’s gloomy conclusion is that the author of the manuscript could not show the characters a way out. Is that an admission of the insufficiency of literature?

There are spots of bright color in this dark painting. Mystery in its various forms, e.g. Korin’s dream, the beauty of the inexplicable manuscript, is magical and positive, life-affirming, full of beauty, like fresh air. I can’t decide whether this is reassuring or disheartening.

Visually, the novel is dominated by skyscrapers, these architectural symbols of longing for transcendence that have been present in most eras in history. In his attempt to find meaning, Korin realizes they are somehow all related: Babel in the Brueghel painting he sees on screen, the Cologne cathedral (a medieval skyscraper, indeed), the 120 Wall Street Building. In Part VII, Krasznahorkai does to Brueghel’s Babel painting what Gert Hofmann did to the painter’s Blind Leading the Blind, or more recently, Iván Sándor to Bosch’s Haywain Triptych.

Krasznahorkai’s voice is so unique, his meandering, interrupted sentences so mischievously rhythmic, that often I can’t tell whether his writing is one big laugh in the face of the anguish that pierces through his speech. There is certainly humor in how the novel becomes its own literary criticism. How others perceive Korin’s narrative and how he analyzes the manuscript perfectly describe the novel itself:

… a narrative that, there was no denying, apart from a certain rhythm, lacked all sense of shape […] except perhaps its copiousness, which resulted in him trying to tell them everything at once […]

… reality examined to the point of madness, and the experience of all those intense mad details, the engraving by sheer manic repetition of the matter into the imagination, was […] as if the writer had written the text not with pen and words but with his nails, scratching the text into the paper and into the mind, all the details, repetitions and intensifications making the process of reading more difficult, while the details it gave, the lists it repeated and the material it intensified was etched into the brain forever.