Greg's Reviews > War & War

Heaven is sad.

That begins, as a benediction of sorts, the book.

I feel like I'm too stupid to fully get Krasznahorkai (we'll call him K. for short from now on in the review, although that ill undoubtedly bring to mind an insurance agent from Prague..... but Kafka is almost appropriate to this novel, or at least his line in one of his Parables and Paradoxes, roughly remembered as, 'the messiah will return only when he is no longer needed'). I love parts of his books, and then I'm baffled and confused by other parts. My understanding of the text feels dreamlike, something is in my grasp and then it slips through it, the scenes change and I'm at a lose and even the thing I thought I was so close to understanding becomes ethereal and I start to doubt I ever understood anything.

I don't quite know what to write about this book. I'm not sure I completely get what K was going for. I'm not sure what the illumination of the post script last chapter is supposed to mean, especially coming after the 'punchline' to the whole novel. Without the last chapter the book is a comedy in the way that the other K writing is comedic (see DFW's essay in Consider the Lobster). With the post-punch-line twenty some odd pages the absurdity of the book shifts, and the novel becomes vaguely tragic. Or is it Beckett like? No. That doesn't work in this situation. I feel like the author / allusion is rattling around in my brain but I can't get the fucking thing to uncloud and reveal itself to me.

Someone I know should read this book, I have questions and no one really to discuss my questions with.

And has K written any books with normal structures? Melancholy of Resistance was long blocks of text. This book has almost as many chapters as a James Patterson novel, but each chapter is made up of just one sentence, one sentence that is anywhere from regular length run of the mill to four or five pages with shifting subjects and temporal settings. Unlike in my last review for a novel by K, I'm not complaining, I'm just feeling curious why he writes in this manner. What is he trying to achieve?