When someone says “László,” the first thing that comes to my mind is Sátántangó — that six-and-a-half-hour-long film, one of Béla Tarr’s greatest works.
It was when he came to borrow that movie that I first met Pradeep Bhasker, a great lover of books. At that time, I was in a reading slump — I would barely finish three or four novels a year, though I watched two to three hundred films. Even this short novel felt beyond me then. To be honest, even now, reading László (Krasznahorkai) isn’t easy. His writing has absolutely no shortcuts — every line winds endlessly. It’s a good thing that Malayalam readers have now become familiar with Jon Fosse’s style, because László is the also a master of the unbroken sentence. Since I haven’t yet finished his two great books (Melancholy and Seiobo There Below), I won’t say much more. I’ve read most of his shorter works. Now, they’ve become a reason for me to try and scale these two mountains at last. Looking at my notes, I see that I had been eagerly waiting for László’s last book, Herscht 07769 (it begins with a man writing an email to Angela Merkel).
It was the book I was most looking forward to last year — I started reading it in January but then fell behind.
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Fosse translated Murnane ’s The Plains, recently. He did it out of genuine admiration.(“I feel that Murnane has a quite unique voice and way of seeing. I’ve never read anything like The Plains, but it resembles my writing — this sense of distance and closeness. We are writing in different ways, but I can tell there’s a similar way of seeing that’s behind it,” said Fosse.)
He didn’t have to do it, but that’s part of a literary culture — in countries and languages with great writers, the masters read and translate other masters. And it must also be said that those writers are equipped for that kind of engagement.
The Plains is considered Murnane’s masterpiece by many. It feels as if both of them — Fosse and Murnane — have recognized each other, there is admiration too.
But Murnane is a tough one. Murnane — though not in the same way as Nabokov, for example — has been critical of writers like László (Krasznahorkai) and Pynchon, who write long, unbroken streams of sentences, while he himself crafts extremely precise prose.(In “Last Letter to the Reader,” he calls out Thomas Pynchon and László as writers who “do nothing more skillful than the stringing together of loosely linked phrases.”). One has to keep that in mind while reading László.
Now, don’t go assuming that Murnane — for all his love of precision and language — dislikes, or never wrote, in the manner of Fosse or László. The most famous example of that is the long, intricately constructed sentence from A Million Windows.
“If, in the further reaches of some or another remote corridor in an immense house of two or, perhaps, three storeys, and behind some or another door that remains mostly closed but in sight of a window overlooking some or another tract of far-reaching landscape of mostly level grassy countryside with low hills or a line of trees in the distance, a certain man at his desk, on some or another day of sunshine with scattered clouds, were to spurn the predictable words and phrases of the many writers of fiction who have reported of this or that male character that he once fell in love with this or that female character, and if that same man, after striving as neither I, the author of this sentence, nor even the most discerning reader of the sentence, have or has striven nor will ever strive, in late afternoon, and at about the time when the rays of the declining sun might have caused the pane in the window of his room to seem to a traveller on a distant road like a spot of golden oil, had found in his heart, or wherever such things are to be found, the words best fitted to suggest what he seemed to have felt long before, on a certain hot afternoon, in a distant inland city, and whether he had simply kept those words in mind or whether he had actually written them, either as notes for a work of fiction that he might one day write or as part of an actual work of fiction, then I do not doubt that the words would have been to the effect that a certain boy, a mere child, while he watched unobserved a certain girl, a mere child, whose name he did not know and who had almost certainly never had sight of him, wished for the means to inform her that he was worthy of trust.”
Murnane said this about the sentence – “That single sentence can be analyzed into 21 separate clauses: a main clause, of course, together with 10 adverbial clauses, five adjectival clauses and five noun clauses.”
Murnane certainly deserves a Nobel.