The concept is nice, and Krasznahorkai brings it out in exceptional prose, filled with long sentences and digressions that force the sentence to pivot and either tighten or loosen up, taking the familiar and bending it.Īnyway, the train does arrive, and the tension deflates a bit, though Krasznahorkai doesn’t let go of the bewilderment, doesn’t allow us to forget that something is amiss. It’s such a familiar event, the delayed train, yet Krasznahorkai goes underneath the surface and shows just how familiar the physical anxiety (that we tend to forget once the event is past) is as well, how a late train, particularly at night, takes someone out of their daily reality into some threatening altered reality. She’s at a strange platform simply trying to get home, and this train is going to get her there uncomfortably late at night. Plauf, one of the unfortunate victims of the late train, and she accutely feels the threat. To tell the truth, none of this really surprised anyone any more since rail travel, like everything else, was subject to the prevailing conditions: all normal expectations went by the board and one’s daily habits were disrupted by a sense of ever-spreading all-consuming chaos which rendered the future unpredictable, the past unrecallable and ordinary life so haphazard that people simply assumed that whatever could be imagined might come to pass. The train is late, and Krasznahorkai shows how such a thing can bend our perceptions, making it “reality, only more so.” The tension builds nicely, much as it does when you’re waiting for a late train and a bit of unwelcome chaos disconcertingly enters the day. The first section of the book is simply amazing, and I was pulled into the book and propelled forward, even though it was late at night and I was just dabbling with the idea of starting the daunting book. It took me a while to read, but it was time well spent - it was an experience.įirst things first: I’m happy to say that once began, the single paragraph thing wasn’t a hurdle at all. I liked it so much that almost immediately I pulled down The Melancholy of Resistance and, never-ending paragraphs be hanged, plunged in. But along came Animalinside (my review here) at just over thirty pages, it was a great way to read a bit of Krasznahorkai without having to commit to such a long text. I have been anxious to read it, but its 314 pages of single paragraphs (there are a few breaks) left me wary. I‘ve had Krasznahorkai’s The Melancholy of Resistance on my shelf for some time now.
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