Name: Chasing Homer
ISBN: 9780811227988

László Krasznahorkai

A classic escape nightmare, Chasing Homer is sped on not only by Krasznahorkai’s signature velocity, but also by a unique musical score and intense illustrations In this thrilling chase narrative, a hunted being escapes certain death at breakneck speed—careening through Europe, heading blindly South. Faster and faster, escaping the assassins, our protagonist flies forward, blending into crowds, adjusting to terrains, hopping on and off ferries, always desperately trying to stay a step ahead of certain death: the past did not exist, only what was current existed—a prisoner of the instant, rushing into this instant, an instant that had no continuation … Krasznahorkai—celebrated for the exhilarating energy of his prose—outdoes himself in Chasing Homer. And this unique collaboration boasts beautiful full-color paintings by Max Neumann and—reaching out of the book proper—the wildly percussive music of Szilveszter Miklós scored for each chapter (to be accessed by the reader via QR codes).

Chasing Homer

Chasing Homer incarnates a classic nightmare: the flight for survival at an ever-escalating velocity, sped on not only by Krasznahorkai's signature breathlessness, but also by a unique musical score and intense illustrations

Less of a novella and more of a ‘multimedia experience’, Chasing Homer is a 70-page story, with each chapter (around 3-5 pages) accompanied both with art by German contemporary artist Max Neumann and music, linked in with QR codes, by Hungarian jazz drummer Szilveszter Miklós. In terms of my experience reading this, I listened to the musical accompaniment when starting a chapter (a track which usually finished before I was even halfway through), finished the chapter, and replayed the music whilst looking at and interpreting the artwork. I know nothing about art or music criticism, but the paintings were of monstrous forms with eerie, sparse detail, giving the same kind of unsettling vibe of drawings made by people undergoing psychosis. The music too is not easy-listening, being mostly bounding, crackling, scuttling percussion beats with no time signature and gradually building in its terrifying intensity throughout the book. 

All of this is combined with Krasznahorkai’s signature (as this is now my second Krasznahorkai work) long, winding, line-break-less, page-long sentences which, despite their length, still allow for relatively easy and enjoyable reading, mostly due to the careful composition and relative straight-forward speaking of its narrator. It's also kept his crass humour, which I loved in Satantango. The overall combined effect of all this—this music, art, writing triple combo—is this nightmarish fever dream of a story in which you are bombarded with fear in every form of perception.

But what is this book about? The blurb says its a chase thriller about a man running away from his pursuers who, if they catch him, will almost certainly kill him (and a funny recurring joke of the novel is the protagonist describing in graphic detail how exactly they will mete out their punishment), but this description is very inaccurate to whatever is actually going on in the story, as it is made incredibly clear from the beginning that the reader should have doubts as to whether these pursuers even exist, or whether the protagonist is guilty of anything at all. The only thing that is clearly real is the ‘pursuit’ and the ‘pursued’ as the narrator spends a large part of the story explaining his neurotic method of avoiding ‘capture’, that being, avoiding shelter, avoiding isolation, moving with crowds, making irrational decisions and movements, and not allowing any time to sleep, eat, drink, have fun, or even think at all. Of course it's an absurd paranoia, so it lends the reader to think of the pursuers as metaphorical. What is chasing him, chasing us? Death, responsibility, God (in the monotheistic sense), the gods (in a Homeric sense)? Perhaps just a general anxiety of living?

Krasznahorkai gives us no easy answers. But an interesting recurring thought I had is that the book resists an interpretation and comments necessarily on the meaning-making of interpretation. What we have here is rather, simply and wholly, the description of a continuous movement, much like the particle when, once its position is precisely determined, one cannot interpret its momentum. The narrator voices his disgust at the fact that 1 + 1 = 2, it's a tautology without any moral or interpretative value. The narrator also laments that since he constantly lives in the present, he is a ‘prisoner of the instant’ — 

‘...if I had the time to think about this between two instants—that I have no need for either past or future because neither one exists. But in fact, I have no time between instants. Since there’s no such thing as two instants.’

What we are left with is a constant, anxious ‘present’—a meaningless but still largely terrifying constant movement. Much like the percussion track that keeps you continuously on edge. Could our lives be construed the same way, just a continuous successive pattern of ‘nows?’ Where are we running then, and what is chasing us?

shain

Less of a novella and more of a ‘multimedia experience’, Chasing Homer is a 70-page story, with each chapter (around 3-5 pages) accompanied both with art by German contemporary artist Max Neumann and music, linked in with QR codes, by Hungarian jazz drummer Szilveszter Miklós. In terms of my experience reading this, I listened to the musical accompaniment when starting a chapter (a track which usually finished before I was even halfway through), finished the chapter, and replayed the music whilst looking at and interpreting the artwork. I know nothing about art or music criticism, but the paintings were of monstrous forms with eerie, sparse detail, giving the same kind of unsettling vibe of drawings made by people undergoing psychosis. The music too is not easy-listening, being mostly bounding, crackling, scuttling percussion beats with no time signature and gradually building in its terrifying intensity throughout the book. 

All of this is combined with Krasznahorkai’s signature (as this is now my second Krasznahorkai work) long, winding, line-break-less, page-long sentences which, despite their length, still allow for relatively easy and enjoyable reading, mostly due to the careful composition and relative straight-forward speaking of its narrator. It's also kept his crass humour, which I loved in Satantango. The overall combined effect of all this—this music, art, writing triple combo—is this nightmarish fever dream of a story in which you are bombarded with fear in every form of perception.

But what is this book about? The blurb says its a chase thriller about a man running away from his pursuers who, if they catch him, will almost certainly kill him (and a funny recurring joke of the novel is the protagonist describing in graphic detail how exactly they will mete out their punishment), but this description is very inaccurate to whatever is actually going on in the story, as it is made incredibly clear from the beginning that the reader should have doubts as to whether these pursuers even exist, or whether the protagonist is guilty of anything at all. The only thing that is clearly real is the ‘pursuit’ and the ‘pursued’ as the narrator spends a large part of the story explaining his neurotic method of avoiding ‘capture’, that being, avoiding shelter, avoiding isolation, moving with crowds, making irrational decisions and movements, and not allowing any time to sleep, eat, drink, have fun, or even think at all. Of course it's an absurd paranoia, so it lends the reader to think of the pursuers as metaphorical. What is chasing him, chasing us? Death, responsibility, God (in the monotheistic sense), the gods (in a Homeric sense)? Perhaps just a general anxiety of living?

Krasznahorkai gives us no easy answers. But an interesting recurring thought I had is that the book resists an interpretation and comments necessarily on the meaning-making of interpretation. What we have here is rather, simply and wholly, the description of a continuous movement, much like the particle when, once its position is precisely determined, one cannot interpret its momentum. The narrator voices his disgust at the fact that 1 + 1 = 2, it's a tautology without any moral or interpretative value. The narrator also laments that since he constantly lives in the present, he is a ‘prisoner of the instant’ — ‘...if I had the time to think about this between two instants—that I have no need for either past or future because neither one exists. But in fact, I have no time between instants. Since there’s no such thing as two instants.’

What we are left with is a constant, anxious ‘present’—a meaningless but still largely terrifying constant movement. Much like the percussion track that keeps you continuously on edge. Could our lives be construed the same way, just a continuous successive pattern of ‘nows?’ Where are we running then, and what is chasing us?

Chasing Homer

Reviews

Highlights