László Krasznahorkai

Long-listed for The Man Booker International Prize 2018A Hungarian interpreter obsessed with waterfalls, at the edge of the abyss in his own mind, wanders the chaotic streets of Shanghai. A traveller, reeling from the sights and sounds of Varanasi, encounters a giant of a man on the banks of the Ganges ranting on the nature of a single drop of water. A child labourer in a Portuguese marble quarry wanders off from work one day into a surreal realm utterly alien from his daily toils.In The World Goes On, a narrator first speaks directly, tells twenty-one unforgettable stories, then bids farewell ('for here I would leave this earth and these stars, because I would take nothing with me'). As László Krasznahorkai himself explains: 'Each text is about drawing our attention away from this world, speeding our body toward annihilation, and immersing ourselves in a current of thought or a narrative...' The World Goes On is another masterpiece by the winner of the 2015 Man Booker International Prize. 'The excitement of his writing,' Adam Thirlwell proclaimed in the New York Review of Books, 'is that he has come up with his own original forms-there is nothing else like it in contemporary literature.'

The World Goes On

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“We are in the midst of a cynical self-reckoning as the not-too-ilustrious children of a not-too-illustrious epoch that will consider itself truly fulilled only when every individual writhing in it—after languishing in one of the deepest shadows of human history—will finally attain the sad and temporarily self-evident goal: oblivion.”

“Nietzsche stated living and being unjust are one and the same," but I cannot find my way out of the insoluble dilemma that time and again situates me in the midst of a longing to discover the meaning of my existence. For just as I am part of this human world, I am also part of what, for some unknown reason, I keep calling a greater whole..”

The World Goes On quotes

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