A review by briancrandall
A Mountain to the North, A Lake to The South, Paths to the West, A River to the East by László Krasznahorkai

5.0

...and the fact that there was no kind of breathtakingly extraordinary plant growing there, no stone of any fantastical shape, nothing special, no spectacle, no fountain, waterfall, no carved tortoise, monkey, or wellspring, accordingly there was no spectacle and no circus, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with pleasantness, neither with exalted or ordinary entertainment, in brief, that simplicity of its essence also denoted a beauty of the densest concentration, the strength of simplicity's enchantment, the effect from which no one could retreat, and whoever saw this garden would never wish to retreat because he would simply stand there, gazing at the moss carpet, which, undulating gently, followed the single surface of the ground that lay beneath it, he would simply stand there and watch, observing how the silvery green of this uninterrupted carpet was like some kind of fairy-tale landscape, because it all glimmered from within, that indescribable silvery hue glimmered from within on the surface of that continuous, thick blanket of moss, and from that silvery surface there rose, fairly close together, with just a few meters separating them, those eight hinoki cypress trees, their trunks covered with marvelous, auburn phloem peeling off in thin strips, their foliage, bathing in vivid, fresh green, and the fine lacework of this foliage reaching up to the heights, in a word whoever stood there and looked at this would never want to utter even a single word; such a person would simply look, and be silent. [106–7]