A magnificent new collection of stories by “the contemporary Hungarian master of apocalypse” (Susan Sontag)
In The World Goes On, a narrator first speaks directly, then tells eleven unforgettable stories, and then bids farewell (“for here I would leave this earth and these stars, because I would take nothing with me”). As László Krasznahoraki himself explains: “Each text is about drawing our attention away from this world, speeding our body toward annihilation, and immersing ourselves in a current of thought or a narrative…”
A Hungarian interpreter obsessed with waterfalls, at the edge of the abyss in his own mind, wanders the chaotic streets of Shanghai. A traveler, reeling from the sights and sounds of Varanasi, encounters a giant of a man on the banks of the Ganges ranting on the nature of a single drop of water. A child laborer in a Portuguese marble quarry wanders off from work one day into a surreal realm utterly alien from his daily toils. The World Goes On is another amazing masterpiece by the winner of the 2015 Man Booker International Prize.
“The excitement of his writing,” Adam Thirwell proclaimed in the New York Review of Books, “is that he has come up with this own original forms―there is nothing else like it in contemporary literature.”
"The spirit of James Joyce hovers over Krasznahorkai's pages, and Nietzsche is never far away, either; indeed, the German philosopher appears early on, breaking down into madness on witnessing a horse being whipped in a Turinese street. In philosophically charged prose, Krasznahorkai questions language, history, and what we take to be facts, all the while rocketing from one corner of the world to the next, from Budapest to Varanasi to Okinawa.."
― Kirkus, Kirkus Review
"Russian cosmonauts, a waterfall-obsessed interpreter in Shanghai teetering on the edge of sanity, and a Portuguese child laborer who escapes his toils by wandering into an alternate reality ...The World Goes On [is] a philosophically-charged new collection of stories about characters that are being pushed (figuratively or literally) to the edges of the world."
― Los Angeles Magazine
"A vision of painstaking beauty."
― NPR
"A work that shows, undiminished, the complexity of existence..."
― The New Yorker
"His work tends to get passed around like rare currency. One of the most profoundly unsettling experiences I have had as a reader."
― James Wood, The New Yorker
"The stories in The World Goes On are the reading equivalent of climbing a volcano instead of sitting by the beach on your honeymoon. But the rewards ― the sudden, knife-like insights so cerebral they seem the work of an alien intelligence ― are worth the effort."
― Adam Morgan, The Star Tribune
"Our current condition of displacement, says László Krasznahorkai in The World Goes On (New Directions), cannot be told; only with great difficulty can language be budged out of endless spirallings of frustration. But then the collection goes on to offer stories of journeys that, whether undertaken or thwarted, arrive at transcendence. At the end there is only one way to go, in what has to be the most powerful page written so far this century."
― Times Literary Supplement
"Krasznahorkai brings elements of Gogol, Bulgakov, Beckett and Bernhard to inimitable, always sympathetic fictions that provoke, entertain and often move us. Over twenty-one stories in The World Goes On...Krasznahorkai's epic sentences show how, in reality, human thought and speech never fully stop, they merely pause. Deeply resonant."
― Eileen Battersby, TLS
"One of the most mysterious artists now at work."
― Colm Tóibín
"I love Krasznahorkai's books. His long, meandering sentences enchant me, and even if his universe appears gloomy, we always experience that transcendence which to Nietzsche represented metaphysical consolation."
― Imre Kertész
