Seiobo There Below, by László Krasznahorkai
I am downright logorrheic when I want to be, speaking breathlessly, manic. A pause, a reversal, a stutter and verbal feint later, I may still not be done; I will lead you in circles, I will lose your train of thought for you, I will demand your close attention while squeezing you dry of it, close in from all sides and fill the room with my words and drain it of air.
Alright so I ramble, so what.
I wasn't ready for the sentences, if I'm being honest. I don't know if I just didn't pay close attention to people talking about this book or what, but I didn't think that it would be twenty-page-long sentences for 450 pages. I don't mind it, and I got used to it; enthralled by it, even. But you should be ready for it, and you should have a pencil and mark off the exact word you left off. Otherwise, you end up here:
I ended up here a lot. I never learned my lesson, either.
One thing I did learn early on with this book is to read it closely, and follow the sentence along, thread by thread, comma to semi-colon to comma, to let the obsession overtake me entirely, lose myself in the beauty of the words, and the beauty the words describe. That's all this book is about. I'm hesitant to call it a novel, I guess it's a novel, because they call it a novel. I would call it a series of vignettes. Which I guess novels also are. There are no overarching plotlines though; unless you're tracing beauty and art and obsession with the above amd the above's effects on our individual and collective psyche. What is it about art that renders us mute, that overwhelms us with emotion, that makes us come back over and over, dwell on it day in and day out, whether we are creating art or paying attention to it, a thoughtful exception to our otherwise artless lives.
What is the itch to write, the sweat in my palms I get, the sense of doom and weight on my chest. You might call it a "panic attack" or "cardiac event"; I call it Wednesday. I don't get inspired so much as feel a deafening, all encompassing shame at not putting words to paper (screen, whatever). Not because I think I'm good at it (I'm fine but I hate most of what I write until sometimes I don't), but because if I didn't I would, quite literally, end myself.
That's art, baby! It's what has to come out or else you die, it's staring at a Rothko until you understand why he did it, it's listening to the swells of The Moldau River until the tears could cut a path right through Bohemia. It's getting your fingers to bleed or speeding a case of arthritis purely from the force of your strums. It's feeling for a moment, what it means to be outside of time, outside of yourself, a glimpse, with full clarity of the present like you never thought possible, hunched over a piece of paper maybe or holding a brush so tight your muscles are screaming out for a pause, feeling the reverberation of a low, deep chord, up through the keyboard and up and down all the way to the tip of your spine, louder and clearer than any note you thought possible.
This book is about feeling all that, and dwelling on it, and attempting to describe it to a friend, breathlessly.
This was my first Krasznahorkai, it certainly won't be my last (I've got The Melancholy of Resistance hanging out on my shelf). If you want to meditate and think about your relationship to art, and beauty, and your obsessions with art and beauty in your own way, this is highly, highly recommended.