Steven Godin's Reviews > War and War

A suicidal clerk going by the name of György Korin who spends a lonely existence working in the archive room of a small Hungarian town discovers an antique manuscript buried in some old boxes that narrates the epic story of four brothers-in-arms (Kasser, Bengazza, Falke and Toót) who appear to be traveling through an ancient Europe on their way home from a war of some kind. It clearly becomes apparent from the early stages that Korin is suffering from some sort of psychiatric disorder and he becomes completely blown away by the startling beauty of his discovery that he rereads this over and over again, in a way he feels chosen that this precious work must be saved for all eternity and decides to write up the whole text onto the internet. But this isn't your average individual, so to follow through his mission he must travel to the center of the world ( this being New York oddly) to do the typing before taking his own life. As Korin has never left Hungary before and with little English his journey is all together heartbreaking but also strangely uplifting at his sheer determination to succeed. Wondering lost on the villainous cold streets of the Big Apple he soon meets with a Hungarian interpreter who helps him buy a laptop and rents him a small room in his apartment where Korin spends his days typing up the manuscript while also at times reading it out to the interpreter's partner who passes him off as a complete loony.

This is a work of breathtaking power and bewilderment and asks some large cosmic questions concerning the disenchantment of our world and the enchanting reverberations of history, while metaphysically studying one's mind into the decent of madness. For those who are not familiar with the work of László Krasznahorkai he writes in the most unconventional way, the sentences he uses are expansive and meandering, although nothing on the scale of "The Melancholy of Resistance" which was at times almost unreadable. "War and War" also contains very little dialogue and use of punctuation marks so takes some getting used to, it's as if a phantom spirit is narrating over proceedings from a distance, and this would be my one and only problem is that everything seems distant that you never really feel for Korin only for his actions, he is a total enigma. And as we are dealing with someone with a mental illness it really is left up to the reader to draw their own conclusions of what to make of it all.

The tone and textures reading varies a lot of the time, from the simple to the perplexing and astonishing, as whole sections during the middle third of the book are basically Korin reading out the manuscript aloud, so in theory at least we have two stories in one, Korin's and that of the four travelers from the manuscript, and it's during this time you just have to hang in there, as to try and make sense of what?, where?, who?, how? or when? is difficult to make out, but this only intensifies the mystery aspect of the story. There are times where things get desperate but there is little in the way of tension or thrills so this is a hard book to categorize and borders on strange realism, madness and historical mythology. The novel on the whole is generally speaking fueled by a bleakness, but this never truly takes hold because your simply always looking beyond that, to it's enchantment, to it's beauty, to it's damn right complexities! . The finale is also somewhat enigmatic even if it seems predictable, and will remain lingering in the mind for some time to come. László Krasznahorkai has established himself as one of the finest writers in contemporary European literature, personally I think he is a genius, and reading "War and War" has only strengthened his case to remain as one of my favourites.