Scan barcode
Reviews
Destruction and Sorrow beneath the Heavens: Reportage by László Krasznahorkai, Ottilie Mulzet
chloekg's review against another edition
5.0
“He’s not a curmudgeon, he’s a Hungarian!”
Holy weeping at the end of the book, and until then missing at least two worlds and as many jokes.
Holy weeping at the end of the book, and until then missing at least two worlds and as many jokes.
arirang's review
2.0
"He sees the new life of New China - the locus of a monstrously vehement desire for money and things that can be gained with money, he sees the masses of tourists inundating the so-called cultural monuments, but he also sees that these people have no connection with their own classical culture, for their cultural monuments no longer exist - in the name of restoration, their essence has been annihilated, annihilated by the most common of tastes and the cheapest of investments as well as by the terrorizing principle of the greatest gain."
A disappointment. This was actually published in the original in 2004 between War & War (1999) and Seiobo There Below (2008).
Destruction and Sorrow Beneath the Heavens has neither the "lava-flow of narrative, a vast black river of type" (per George Szirtes) of War & War and Satantango, nor the sublime prose of Seiobo. Instead, the dominant note is curmudgeon - Thomas Bernhard but without the savage humour or the irony.
The translator, the excellent Ottilie Mulzet (also Seiobo and Animalinside) can not be faulted - she can only work with the text presented to her.
Billed as "Reportage" this is essentially a non-fictional account of Krasznahorkai's "planned quest for the detritus of Chinese classical culture", although he writes as a third person narrator of the quest of one "Laszlo Stein", a writer but of poems.
In the original, and indeed in the early review copies in English, the seeker was called László Dante (apparently changed to Stein in the final English at the author's request), which obviously hints at links to the Inferno - as pointed out in the excellent review at (http://www.vqronline.org/nonfiction-criticism/2016/01/hungary%E2%80%99s-bounty). In that reading, this novel, which came between the more apocalyptic European works ("Hell") and the more rapturous Seiobo ("Heaven") is Purgatory, although I am more reminded of Revelation 3.16 "So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth."
An air of profound disappointment and bewilderment is Stein's dominant view. We follow him, and his Hungarian but Chinese-speaking translator, on a trip around China in search of authentic ancient Chinese culture, visiting various sites but also conversing with Chinese intellectuals and cultural figures with him lamenting the failure of his decade long quest.
"10 years, as he has travelled through the provinces of China and viewed temples and monuments, [what he has seen] is nothing other than the destruction of those exquisite objects in the hands of those who are not worthy."
The "not worthy" comment highlights one major issue. Stein displays the worst kind of cultural snobbery - when he and his translator find a living village historically preserved ("as if they had wandered into a marvellous dream taking place at exactly that time, the time of the Ming or the Qing, because nothing has changed"), all is wonderful, until other tourists dare to turn up to see the same thing "arriving relentlessly like an attacking army."
The bigger problem is that Stein/Krasznahorkai seems to wish that China, and its 1 billion people, had opted out of any economic progress in the 20th and 21st Centuries and to have been preserved as a museum for his benefit. He only finds pleasure where he sees that "New China" (used as a pejorative term e.g. "New China, the China that he, Stein, is trying to escape") has yet to reach:
"This is not a place where anything can change, he says, thank God, everything here is so far away from the world, it has remained intact and unspoiled."
So, for example, when a poet points out to him the hypocrisy that "westerners love traditional Chinese culture, but that was completely dictatorial! They say dictatorships are bad" Stein replies that he is fine with China bypassing democracy if that's what it takes.
There is a worrying sexist edge as well. Almost all his female interlocutors are largely remarked on for their appearance ("the amazing, particularly beautiful fashion designer", the "beautiful" museum director). Indeed in the last case, Stein doesn't even recount or recall her words, only that while talking she sucked on a lock of her "wondrously glittering, ebony black hair."
The one counterweight to my view is that I may have misinterpreted Krasznahorkai's intention.
The use of the "Laszlo Stein" device could signal a distancing of view between the author and the character, in which case some of my Krasznahorkai may be inviting us to criticise Stein's views rather than the novel. But I don't believe that was the intention.
Also Stein's interlocutors often strongly refute Stein's views.
One points out "things were always just as difficult or truly original thinkers and artists, as they are today - they lived solitary and oppressed in their own times". Another, a professor of literary history, responds to his views "that is certainly not the case...classical culture is in a much better position than it has ever been..because a very important aspect of classical culture is that it is very adaptable...the true goal of modernisation is for tradition to live within it but to live in a renewed form."
But Stein's views remain unchanged. Indeed the most common rhetorical device in the novel has "Stein stubbornly persist with his original question" even as the person he is talking to outright disagrees or more commonly deflects or politely ignores his views. These dialogues of the death, largely transcribed, it is hinted, from type recordings don't make for particularly enlightening or literary reading.
There are, nevertheless, nuggets of interest that one can dredge from the responses. One common theme is that Chinese culture is different - it isn't preserved in buildings or objects. Several highlight the distinctive nature of Chinese writing "a character in the Chinese language is not, in its essence, merely a word, the written form of a concept, but a vision, an apparition." Although at the same time, much knowledge and culture isn't codified but rather handed down from Master to apprentice, a theme that will reappear in Seiobo.
Ultimately, of interest to Krasznahorkai's completists, of which, to be fair, I am one, to understand the journey that took him from apocalyptic novels about Eastern Europe to those about the heights of East Asian culture. But rather dull and even disagreeable in its own right.
Originally (Hungarian and also in English ARC), the narrator was Dante Stein. Odd decision was made to change it to László Stein in the final English version, presumably to signpost to the reader that the narration is essentially autobiographical, but doing so misses the explicit nod to Dante in the progression of these three novels.
A disappointment. This was actually published in the original in 2004 between War & War (1999) and Seiobo There Below (2008).
Destruction and Sorrow Beneath the Heavens has neither the "lava-flow of narrative, a vast black river of type" (per George Szirtes) of War & War and Satantango, nor the sublime prose of Seiobo. Instead, the dominant note is curmudgeon - Thomas Bernhard but without the savage humour or the irony.
The translator, the excellent Ottilie Mulzet (also Seiobo and Animalinside) can not be faulted - she can only work with the text presented to her.
Billed as "Reportage" this is essentially a non-fictional account of Krasznahorkai's "planned quest for the detritus of Chinese classical culture", although he writes as a third person narrator of the quest of one "Laszlo Stein", a writer but of poems.
In the original, and indeed in the early review copies in English, the seeker was called László Dante (apparently changed to Stein in the final English at the author's request), which obviously hints at links to the Inferno - as pointed out in the excellent review at (http://www.vqronline.org/nonfiction-criticism/2016/01/hungary%E2%80%99s-bounty). In that reading, this novel, which came between the more apocalyptic European works ("Hell") and the more rapturous Seiobo ("Heaven") is Purgatory, although I am more reminded of Revelation 3.16 "So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth."
An air of profound disappointment and bewilderment is Stein's dominant view. We follow him, and his Hungarian but Chinese-speaking translator, on a trip around China in search of authentic ancient Chinese culture, visiting various sites but also conversing with Chinese intellectuals and cultural figures with him lamenting the failure of his decade long quest.
"10 years, as he has travelled through the provinces of China and viewed temples and monuments, [what he has seen] is nothing other than the destruction of those exquisite objects in the hands of those who are not worthy."
The "not worthy" comment highlights one major issue. Stein displays the worst kind of cultural snobbery - when he and his translator find a living village historically preserved ("as if they had wandered into a marvellous dream taking place at exactly that time, the time of the Ming or the Qing, because nothing has changed"), all is wonderful, until other tourists dare to turn up to see the same thing "arriving relentlessly like an attacking army."
The bigger problem is that Stein/Krasznahorkai seems to wish that China, and its 1 billion people, had opted out of any economic progress in the 20th and 21st Centuries and to have been preserved as a museum for his benefit. He only finds pleasure where he sees that "New China" (used as a pejorative term e.g. "New China, the China that he, Stein, is trying to escape") has yet to reach:
"This is not a place where anything can change, he says, thank God, everything here is so far away from the world, it has remained intact and unspoiled."
So, for example, when a poet points out to him the hypocrisy that "westerners love traditional Chinese culture, but that was completely dictatorial! They say dictatorships are bad" Stein replies that he is fine with China bypassing democracy if that's what it takes.
There is a worrying sexist edge as well. Almost all his female interlocutors are largely remarked on for their appearance ("the amazing, particularly beautiful fashion designer", the "beautiful" museum director). Indeed in the last case, Stein doesn't even recount or recall her words, only that while talking she sucked on a lock of her "wondrously glittering, ebony black hair."
The one counterweight to my view is that I may have misinterpreted Krasznahorkai's intention.
The use of the "Laszlo Stein" device could signal a distancing of view between the author and the character, in which case some of my Krasznahorkai may be inviting us to criticise Stein's views rather than the novel. But I don't believe that was the intention.
Also Stein's interlocutors often strongly refute Stein's views.
One points out "things were always just as difficult or truly original thinkers and artists, as they are today - they lived solitary and oppressed in their own times". Another, a professor of literary history, responds to his views "that is certainly not the case...classical culture is in a much better position than it has ever been..because a very important aspect of classical culture is that it is very adaptable...the true goal of modernisation is for tradition to live within it but to live in a renewed form."
But Stein's views remain unchanged. Indeed the most common rhetorical device in the novel has "Stein stubbornly persist with his original question" even as the person he is talking to outright disagrees or more commonly deflects or politely ignores his views. These dialogues of the death, largely transcribed, it is hinted, from type recordings don't make for particularly enlightening or literary reading.
There are, nevertheless, nuggets of interest that one can dredge from the responses. One common theme is that Chinese culture is different - it isn't preserved in buildings or objects. Several highlight the distinctive nature of Chinese writing "a character in the Chinese language is not, in its essence, merely a word, the written form of a concept, but a vision, an apparition." Although at the same time, much knowledge and culture isn't codified but rather handed down from Master to apprentice, a theme that will reappear in Seiobo.
Ultimately, of interest to Krasznahorkai's completists, of which, to be fair, I am one, to understand the journey that took him from apocalyptic novels about Eastern Europe to those about the heights of East Asian culture. But rather dull and even disagreeable in its own right.
Originally (Hungarian and also in English ARC), the narrator was Dante Stein. Odd decision was made to change it to László Stein in the final English version, presumably to signpost to the reader that the narration is essentially autobiographical, but doing so misses the explicit nod to Dante in the progression of these three novels.
More...