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4.11 AVERAGE
4.11 AVERAGE
4.5
felt like a play where you know if you look away from the spotlighted characters playing their parts you're confronted with it's artificiality, and the darkness of the stage wings, but it doesn't unmake the world created on stage and does nothing to stop the story from unfolding the way it always will.
its a feverish the devil comes to town story with beautiful prose and I'm always impressed when a translated work like this still holds up in a second language. the sentences ramble for an incredibly long time but without feeling awkward, it's a very distinctive style. the plot is disturbing and occasionally very funny and still makes me feel like I'm missing something important. it reminded me of rosencrantz and guildenstern are dead with the chopping block everyone's heading towards being the inevitability of poverty instead of an actual chopping block.
I want to revisit this but I think the next book in the trilogy, the melancholy of resistance, might be more important to see the bigger picture of whatever krasznahorkai's trying to get across.
felt like a play where you know if you look away from the spotlighted characters playing their parts you're confronted with it's artificiality, and the darkness of the stage wings, but it doesn't unmake the world created on stage and does nothing to stop the story from unfolding the way it always will.
its a feverish the devil comes to town story with beautiful prose and I'm always impressed when a translated work like this still holds up in a second language. the sentences ramble for an incredibly long time but without feeling awkward, it's a very distinctive style. the plot is disturbing and occasionally very funny and still makes me feel like I'm missing something important. it reminded me of rosencrantz and guildenstern are dead with the chopping block everyone's heading towards being the inevitability of poverty instead of an actual chopping block.
I want to revisit this but I think the next book in the trilogy, the melancholy of resistance, might be more important to see the bigger picture of whatever krasznahorkai's trying to get across.
dark
mysterious
slow-paced
Greu de parcurs! Limbajul bogat și descriptiv e singurul lucru care mi-a plăcut.
Povestea în sine e demoralizatoare și deprimantă, o adunătură de oameni bețivi, majoritatea fără o slujbă, trăiesc din inerție, se lasă consumați de instincte, adunați toți într-un ținut uitat de lume.
Nici nu sunt curioasă să văd ecranizarea lui Bela Tarr!
Povestea în sine e demoralizatoare și deprimantă, o adunătură de oameni bețivi, majoritatea fără o slujbă, trăiesc din inerție, se lasă consumați de instincte, adunați toți într-un ținut uitat de lume.
Nici nu sunt curioasă să văd ecranizarea lui Bela Tarr!
Did a review of this book here: https://youtu.be/9fBvakS6FaA
When I first started reading this book, I thought about quitting--even took two weeks off from the reading. Then I came back and got to the second part. I will keep this pithy by saying that his narrating technique feels like a structured stream of consciousness and the last fourteen pages are truly magical.
dark
funny
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
dark
mysterious
medium-paced
in the wise words of jesse pinkman, that was totally kafkaesque
Structured with the forward/back variations of a tango dance, Krasznahorkai weaves in an itinerant narrative of a fallen village/ideology in which hopes & deceptions & visions & depravity & nostalgia & wishes & manipulations guide characters in their rises and falling, with schemes concocted at times as if they were possessed.
It's very sad, in that characters are displayed taking action or inaction while at wits end and also subscribing to a devotion of fantasy of some sort, leading to a cast of hopeful and hopelessly driven folks seemingly willing to do or believe anything to keep their lives above the despondency clearly present in the day-to-day lives depicted.
"There's no sense or meaning in anything. It's nothing but a network of dependency under enormous fluctuating pressures. It's only our imaginations, not our senses, that continually confront us with failure and the false belief that we can raise ourselves by our own bootstraps from the miserable pulp of decay. There's no escaping that, stupid."
In comes messianic Irimiás, a possible charlatan whose real or imagined presence has an effect on an easily-hoodwinked group of village survivors. The thoughts and dialogue of the characters are hardly spared -- Krasznahorkai spills dizzying words in conveying the meandering minds of the crew and does so well at it that the readers sometimes feels as lost in the sentences as the characters mentioned in same.
It's not a light read by any means, but captivating and in many ways terrifying as indicative of a world gone bad peopled by humans immovable in faith and assumed heroicism amid the dregs of daily existence.
It's very sad, in that characters are displayed taking action or inaction while at wits end and also subscribing to a devotion of fantasy of some sort, leading to a cast of hopeful and hopelessly driven folks seemingly willing to do or believe anything to keep their lives above the despondency clearly present in the day-to-day lives depicted.
"There's no sense or meaning in anything. It's nothing but a network of dependency under enormous fluctuating pressures. It's only our imaginations, not our senses, that continually confront us with failure and the false belief that we can raise ourselves by our own bootstraps from the miserable pulp of decay. There's no escaping that, stupid."
In comes messianic Irimiás, a possible charlatan whose real or imagined presence has an effect on an easily-hoodwinked group of village survivors. The thoughts and dialogue of the characters are hardly spared -- Krasznahorkai spills dizzying words in conveying the meandering minds of the crew and does so well at it that the readers sometimes feels as lost in the sentences as the characters mentioned in same.
It's not a light read by any means, but captivating and in many ways terrifying as indicative of a world gone bad peopled by humans immovable in faith and assumed heroicism amid the dregs of daily existence.