Mystery Bag – Krasznahorkai

After numerous failed attempts to read the Hungarian master, I finally felt it click.

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The second book I pulled from the blind bag was A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East by László Krasznahorkai (New Directions, 2022, trans. Ottilie Mulzet) – a title I’m pretty sure I would have never picked up and read without the constraint. I’ve tried multiple times to get into Krasznahorkai based on the highly favorable and innovation-praising feedback that I’ve heard about his work—including attempts at reading The Melancholy of Resistance (2002), War and War (2006), and The World Goes On (2017)—but always found myself disengaging and setting it aside somewhere in the first 100 pages.

Despite my usual love of compound sentences, rhythmic pacing, and the long take, something about each of those longer novels never let me in past arm’s length, always feeling a little too pendulous and repetitive rather than transcendent. I found myself continuously looking ahead to see how far until a break point came, letting my eyes go loose and skimming more than reading at times to try to push past. Often my will to have absorbed a text can feed me enough gas to push through the relative tedium in expectation that it will all somehow pay off in the end, but sometimes it’s just more likely that this book might not be for you right now, if ever. Not all supposed great works are for everybody, certainly, and no matter how many other people find something inspiring, sometimes it’s worth more learning what isn’t part of your aesthetic DNA. At the same time, it’s kind of magical when something we thought we didn’t like for most of our lives suddenly shifts in context as you age, and so I try to leave the door open to possibility for bodies of work like Krasznahorkai’s that clearly have earned a foothold in world literature, even if not quite yet in my own mind.