Herscht 00769, by László Krasznahorkai review: 'a terrifying titan amid literary midgets'

Written in a single, 406-page long sentence, the new novel from International Booker Prize winner László Krasznahorkai achieves some extraordinary effects, writes Stuart Kelly

László Krasznahorkai | Carlos Alvarez/Getty Images

Surveying the world of books – especially in the run up to the holidays – can be a singularly dispiriting experience; like gazing at a wrack of ephemera floating on an ocean of effluent. Miraculously, nevertheless, publishing does still manage to produce literature. It is a privilege to be in the first generation to have read the likes of Roberto Bolaño, Marilynne Robinson, Olga Tokarczuk and László Krasznahorkai. These are the kind of authors who are profoundly and necessarily serious in our unserious age. Krasznahorkai is a terrifying titan amid literary midgets.

There is every reason to be daunted by Krasznahorkai’s latest work (translated by Ottilie Mulzet rather than George Szirtes). It is 406 pages long, comprises a single sentence (pedantically one might say that it has no full stops), and the epigraph succinctly encapsulates Krasznahorkai’s worldview: “Hope is a mistake”. Yet what a humane, compelling, intriguing novel it is, and remarkably it is perhaps less oblique and eccentric that his previous works. If you are going to commence on Krasznahorkai, this might well be the book. It takes no more than a few pages to tune into the style, and the reader quickly picks up when the flow is going to pivot. The free-floating nature of it means Krasznahorkai can create some extraordinary effects, like narrating the very moment of a death.

The title refers to the surname and postcode of the central character, Florian Herscht, who is sending impassioned correspondence to Angela Merkel (hence his return address). Florian is an immensely strong orphan who grew up in care, is deemed educationally subnormal and has somehow – dubiously, one assumes – been taken into the care of a gang leader only called “the Boss”. Florian is akin to figures such as Steinbeck’s Lennie Small in Of Mice and Men, “Benjie” Compson in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and George Bone in Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton. One key difference: Florian is studiedly asexual, and to that extent like Prince Myshkin in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. Florian is a conundrum, a potentially lethal naïf, a dangerous innocent.

Florian’s epistles to the German Chancellor have been precipitated by taking night-classes with Herr Köhler, a retired physics teacher and amateur meteorologist, and in particular Florian’s concern that, for no reason and with no warning, one particle more of matter than anti-matter was once created, leading to the universe as we experience it. By Florian’s logic, which Köhler struggles to refute, the universe might therefore cease again at any moment, a situation for which at least NATO and probably the UN should be prepared. But a more immediate anxiety is that the Boss, one of whose interests is a graffiti cleaning service, is apoplectic about wolf symbols being daubed on any public commemoration of his beloved Johann Sebastian Bach. As a civic-minded man, as well as a raging neo-Nazi, the Boss enlists Florian alongside his fascist fellow-travellers and Bach enthusiasts, to find the culprit. The narrative is then driven by two twists. Köhler disappears (possibly, thinks Florian, on the orders or invite of Angela Merkel) and a local librarian, Frau Ringer, is attacked by a wolf.

Although a bare synopsis does show the comedic if macabre underpinning of the book, the execution is more cinematic. Various grievances and vengeances are barely suppressed, and their unfurling is reminiscent of the Coen Brothers more than Krasznahorkai’s collaborator, the Hungarian director Béla Tarr. There is a Lynchian ambience to the surreal minor characters: a one-eyed female terrorist, a local trying ineffectually to sell honey, an old lady’s preoccupation with staging a chrysanthemum show, the fact that the Boss’s Bach orchestra prefer playing the Beatles and the Game of Thrones soundtrack. But even these oddities have an undercurrent of imminent threat and delusional optimism. The text carefully notes the funereal symbolism of the flowers.

There are certain elements that echo with Krasznahorkai’s previous works. There are shades of the novella The Last Wolf, obviously, but the quantum speculations are in the same key as the fictitious book by Sir Wilford Stanley Gilmore in A Mountain to the North…, which claimed to disprove the possibility of infinity. The Nazis here – or Nazzis as they are belittled as – are not as competent as the monstrous Mrs Estzer in The Melancholy of Resistance, but somehow the tired acceptance of them, even of their white supremacist fondness for Route 88, is almost most chilling (they are referred to at one point as “those poor Nazis”).

The characters in the book within a book in War and War were constantly fleeing cataclysms; in Herscht 00769 Florian writes “that the apocalypse is the natural state of life, the world, the universe, and of the Something, the apocalypse is now, Mrs Chanceller, that is what we have been living in for billions and years and in comparison to the Beginning it is nothing”.

There is nothing as utterly scream-like as the litany of curses, the commination without a deity, at the end of War and War, but this novel does leave the reader in no doubt that there is “neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; / And we are here as on a darkling plain”, as Matthew Arnold wrote. The irony is that Krasznahorkai depicts a meaningless, nihilistic universe, yet a universe with the work of Krasznahorkai in it cannot be meaningless or nihilistic. He almost admits it, given that the most significant Bach cantata in it is “Tilge, Höchster, meine Sünden”: Psalm 51, “Wash away, most High, my sins”.

Herscht 00769, by László Krasznahorkai, Tuskar Rock Press, £20