Description
The National Book Award winner’s breathtaking new novel about neo-Nazis, particle physics, and Johann Sebastian Bach
A WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK OF 2024
A PUBLISHERS WEEKY BEST BOOK OF 2024
The gentle giant Florian Herscht has a problem: having faithfully attended Herr Köhler’s adult education classes in physics, he is convinced that disaster is imminent. And so, he embarks upon a one-sided correspondence with Chancellor Angela Merkel, to convince her of the danger of the complete destruction of all physical matter. Otherwise, he works for the Boss (the head of a local neo-Nazi gang), who has taken him under his wing and gotten him work as a graffiti cleaner and also a one-room apartment in the small eastern German town of Kana. The Boss is enraged by a graffiti artist who, with wolf emblems, is defacing all the various monuments to Johann Sebastian Bach in Thuringia. A Bach fanatic and director of an amateur orchestra, he is determined to catch the culprit with the help of his gang, and Florian has no choice but to join the chase. The situation becomes even more frightening, and havoc ensues, when real wolves are sighted in the area…
Written in one cascading sentence with the power of atomic particles colliding, Krasznahorkai’s novel is a tour de force, a morality play, a blistering satire, a devastating encapsulation of our helplessness when confronted with the moral and environmental dilemmas we face.
Reviews
"The universality of Krasznahorkai’s vision rivals that of Gogol’s Dead Souls and far surpasses allthe lesser concerns of contemporary writing." — W. G. Sebald
"The contemporary Hungarian master of the apocalypse." — Susan Sontag
"Krasznahorkai has come up with his own forms. There is nothing else like it in contemporary literature." — Adam Thirlwell, The New York Review of Books
"Krasznahorkai’s latest postmodern experiment explores small-town discontents in post-unification eastern Germany. Brilliant, like all of Krasznahorkai’s books—and just as challenging, though well worth the effort required." — Kirkus Reviews
"Krasznahorkai’s brilliantly cacophonous novel, which conveys the sense that the end is already here, and that the trappings of civilization are easier to scrape away than paint from stone. This stands with Krasznahorkai’s best work. " — Publisher's Weekly
""Krasznahorkai’s work offers, to a degree rare in contemporary life, one of the central pleasures of fiction: an encounter with the otherness of other people. He’s a universalist cut loose from the shibboleths of humanism."" — Garth Risk Hallberg, The New York Times
""The best new novel I have read this year is written in a single sentence that sprawls over 400 pages. Herscht 07769 by the Hungarian genius László Krasznahorkai [is] an urgent depiction of our global social and political crises, rendering our impotent slide into authoritarianism with compassionate clarity. It is also a book whose timeliness derives precisely from the way its unusual style disrupts the ordinary literary mechanics of time....A masterful study in what it means to keep trudging through a world that is always ending but will not end."" — Jacob Brogan, The Washington Post
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