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From North by Hill, From South by Lake, From West by Paths, From East by River
Al sur de Kioto, junto a la vía del tren de la línea de Keihan, a sólo una parada de la ciudad, hay un monasterio. Una escalada laberíntica conduce al nieto del príncipe de Genji a este lugar apartado. No muy lejos de allí, dicen, tiene que hallarse el jardín más hermoso del mundo. Camina por todo el recinto del monasterio como movido por una fuerza interior. Una construcción sutil ha dado forma a la naturaleza, cada cosa tiene su lugar y cada forma su significado. Y así se desplaza una mirada perspicaz y minuciosa sobre la naturaleza, sobre las plantas, el viento y los pájaros, pero también sobre la arquitectura, las pagodas, las terrazas y los patios. Dejar que lo pequeño devenga grande, desplazar lo secreto al centro de atención, rastrear la belleza de lo cotidiano, eso es lo que hace László Krasznahorkai en este viaje literario al Japón, un libro de una prosa embriagadora, fascinante, que nos transporta al universo ideológico y sentimental del país nipón.
69 pages, ebook
First published January 1, 2003
185 people are currently reading
3822 people want to read
About the author
László Krasznahorkai
46 books2,729 followersLászló Krasznahorkai is a Hungarian novelist and screenwriter who is known for critically difficult and demanding novels, often labelled as postmodern, with dystopian and bleak melancholic themes. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2025.
He is probably best known through the oeuvre of the director Béla Tarr, who has collaborated with him on several movies.
Apart from the Nobel Prize, Krasznahorkai has also been honored with numerous literary prizes, among them the highest award of the Hungarian state, the Kossuth Prize, and the 2015 Man Booker International Prize for his English-translated oeuvre.
He is probably best known through the oeuvre of the director Béla Tarr, who has collaborated with him on several movies.
Apart from the Nobel Prize, Krasznahorkai has also been honored with numerous literary prizes, among them the highest award of the Hungarian state, the Kossuth Prize, and the 2015 Man Booker International Prize for his English-translated oeuvre.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 257 reviews
October 10, 2025
Unattainability
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.
Known as the heart of Japan due to its former capital status and immense cultural heritage, Kyoto retains a deep sense of mystery and timelessness even nowadays.
Having visited Kyoto several times and being interested in Japanese traditional architecture, I cannot express my endless fascination with the simple beauty of its temples, philosophy gardens, tea houses, and hidden alleys, as well as its delicate relationship with nature and even the small details in the pavement. The spirit of the place is undeniable and unique. In addition, there is an interesting dichotomy, almost a clash, between the old and the new, ancient craft and high technology. While I’ve got my crazes and manias, I’m far from a Japanese history and culture connoisseur, so I admire the Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai for choosing Kyoto as a setting for his contemplative tale.
Right from the start, there is a sense of mystery. The title itself is strangely allusive - it can be a verse, a map or a compass. Furthermore, the first chapter is missing, which creates a feeling of something incomplete and unattainable, enticing us to search and explore.
Impermanence
The grandson of the Prince of Genji roams through a timeless Kyoto in search of a hidden garden, the most perfect and the most beautiful one. Is it real or imaginary? We are invited to wander, explore and reflect on perfection, simplicity, infinity and impermanence.
That song lasted only a single minute. When it stopped, the little bird ascended suddenly into the sky along a straight line, then, tracing the form of a few rising and falling ellipses it was gone, ascending into the distance, so high up that there was no eye that could have been capable of discerning that tiny spot, that tiny point, like the tip of a needle growing ever smaller in the shimmering distance of the azure-blue firmament.
In Japanese, there is an expression 物の哀れ mono no aware originating from the Heian period (probably from The Tale of Genji itself) which conveys a sense of awareness of impermanence and the beauty of the ephemeral. Some of Krasznahorkai’s passages remind me of this feeling.
Infinity
We are defined and limited by our human scale and measurements. While looking for a garden, we stumble upon an obsessive mathematical contemplation about infinity, which quickly turns into a philosophical question. What is the largest number with a name? What is the distance between two numbers? Krasznahorkai suggests that resolution isn’t even the most significant thing. Even if a destination is unattainable, nothing invalidates the possibility of a journey or a search.
This was no mere wall, but the inner dimension of something, which merely intended, with this evocation, to alert the one arriving that very soon other units of measurement would be required than the ones to which he’d been accustomed; other ratios than the ones hitherto enclosing his life would now be determinative.
Can geology, biology or geography be poetic? Alternating between detailed architectural descriptions, Borgesian reflections and roaming lyricism, Krasznahorkai’s elliptical sentences can run on for pages at a time.
There are over 1600 temples and shrines in Kyoto. While the temple complex Krasznahorkai describes here sounds like Eikando of Zenrinji, I don’t think it’s exclusive to a single temple, or even a Buddhist setting, for that matter. A different setting on the other side of the world is not unimaginable.
Influenced by my own travels to Kyoto and notions on architecture, I have connected with some parts of this book more than others. Yet, more than a reading experience, I perceived this novel as a moment of contemplation or meditation. A Mountain to the North is a beautiful work about a search for the unattainable, ancient times, contemporary world, nature and being.
Since A Mountain to the North invites multiple readings, I’ll happily come back to it and see if and how my impressions change. Being acquainted with some of Béla Tarr’s films and having heard that other Krasznahorkai’s novels are rather dark in tone and atmosphere, I presume this is not his typical work. Yet I couldn’t have asked for a better introduction to this author. Let’s see if I can gather enough courage to dance Satantango.
Here is an article with Lomography about some of my own memories of Kyoto on film.
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.
Known as the heart of Japan due to its former capital status and immense cultural heritage, Kyoto retains a deep sense of mystery and timelessness even nowadays.
Having visited Kyoto several times and being interested in Japanese traditional architecture, I cannot express my endless fascination with the simple beauty of its temples, philosophy gardens, tea houses, and hidden alleys, as well as its delicate relationship with nature and even the small details in the pavement. The spirit of the place is undeniable and unique. In addition, there is an interesting dichotomy, almost a clash, between the old and the new, ancient craft and high technology. While I’ve got my crazes and manias, I’m far from a Japanese history and culture connoisseur, so I admire the Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai for choosing Kyoto as a setting for his contemplative tale.
Right from the start, there is a sense of mystery. The title itself is strangely allusive - it can be a verse, a map or a compass. Furthermore, the first chapter is missing, which creates a feeling of something incomplete and unattainable, enticing us to search and explore.
Impermanence
The grandson of the Prince of Genji roams through a timeless Kyoto in search of a hidden garden, the most perfect and the most beautiful one. Is it real or imaginary? We are invited to wander, explore and reflect on perfection, simplicity, infinity and impermanence.
That song lasted only a single minute. When it stopped, the little bird ascended suddenly into the sky along a straight line, then, tracing the form of a few rising and falling ellipses it was gone, ascending into the distance, so high up that there was no eye that could have been capable of discerning that tiny spot, that tiny point, like the tip of a needle growing ever smaller in the shimmering distance of the azure-blue firmament.
In Japanese, there is an expression 物の哀れ mono no aware originating from the Heian period (probably from The Tale of Genji itself) which conveys a sense of awareness of impermanence and the beauty of the ephemeral. Some of Krasznahorkai’s passages remind me of this feeling.
Infinity
We are defined and limited by our human scale and measurements. While looking for a garden, we stumble upon an obsessive mathematical contemplation about infinity, which quickly turns into a philosophical question. What is the largest number with a name? What is the distance between two numbers? Krasznahorkai suggests that resolution isn’t even the most significant thing. Even if a destination is unattainable, nothing invalidates the possibility of a journey or a search.
This was no mere wall, but the inner dimension of something, which merely intended, with this evocation, to alert the one arriving that very soon other units of measurement would be required than the ones to which he’d been accustomed; other ratios than the ones hitherto enclosing his life would now be determinative.
Can geology, biology or geography be poetic? Alternating between detailed architectural descriptions, Borgesian reflections and roaming lyricism, Krasznahorkai’s elliptical sentences can run on for pages at a time.
There are over 1600 temples and shrines in Kyoto. While the temple complex Krasznahorkai describes here sounds like Eikando of Zenrinji, I don’t think it’s exclusive to a single temple, or even a Buddhist setting, for that matter. A different setting on the other side of the world is not unimaginable.
Influenced by my own travels to Kyoto and notions on architecture, I have connected with some parts of this book more than others. Yet, more than a reading experience, I perceived this novel as a moment of contemplation or meditation. A Mountain to the North is a beautiful work about a search for the unattainable, ancient times, contemporary world, nature and being.
Since A Mountain to the North invites multiple readings, I’ll happily come back to it and see if and how my impressions change. Being acquainted with some of Béla Tarr’s films and having heard that other Krasznahorkai’s novels are rather dark in tone and atmosphere, I presume this is not his typical work. Yet I couldn’t have asked for a better introduction to this author. Let’s see if I can gather enough courage to dance Satantango.
Here is an article with Lomography about some of my own memories of Kyoto on film.
Read
July 2, 2023Billed as a novella, but it really doesn't read like one. That fictional element appears now and then and features "the grandson of Prince Genji" who apparently takes the train to travel time. He's in search of a book about secret gardens, last seen at the monastery on a mountain in (near?) Kyoto.
The trouble for grandson is nobody's home. This monastery is abandoned, which gives author Krasznahorkai time to describe the monastery in minute detail. Every inch of it. Then to launch into its history and what went into building it. And talk a little bit about the builders and the abbott and all the people who are, at this point, so many ghosts.
It is this aspect of the short book that reigns supreme, making it read chiefly like a nonfiction book found among Dewey's Decimals. A book that shows off all the research K. put into this beautiful building, and man, did he do his homework!
If you are into Japanese culture, monasteries, and Buddhism, the factual aspects of the book will surely appeal. I was looking for a little more excitement from the Grandson of Prince Genji thread, but apparently I was looking for the wrong thing.
P.S. As for the long title, these are landscape features one looks for when deciding to build a Buddhist temple.
The trouble for grandson is nobody's home. This monastery is abandoned, which gives author Krasznahorkai time to describe the monastery in minute detail. Every inch of it. Then to launch into its history and what went into building it. And talk a little bit about the builders and the abbott and all the people who are, at this point, so many ghosts.
It is this aspect of the short book that reigns supreme, making it read chiefly like a nonfiction book found among Dewey's Decimals. A book that shows off all the research K. put into this beautiful building, and man, did he do his homework!
If you are into Japanese culture, monasteries, and Buddhism, the factual aspects of the book will surely appeal. I was looking for a little more excitement from the Grandson of Prince Genji thread, but apparently I was looking for the wrong thing.
P.S. As for the long title, these are landscape features one looks for when deciding to build a Buddhist temple.
October 10, 2025
Lectura muy sorprendente. De una lectura ligera podría decirse que no tiene nada que ver con lo que hasta ahora había leído de Krasznahorkai, pero en realidad de una lectura profunda siento que es puro Krasznahorkai.
Es un ejercicio de estilo, no pretende una narración al uso, es muy contemplativa, meditativa, muy zen, en un viaje hacia un templo perdido que convierte el espacio geográfico en un mapa metafísico, yo diría que sobre el deseo de iluminación, e imagino que el título alude a unas coordenadas espirituales (no se trata de un lugar físico sino de una manera de ser simbólica: la permanencia, la profundidad, el aprendizaje, el movimiento). La lectura en sí me ha parecido una práctica espiritual, no hay una narración lineal, no hay una meta final en la que resuelva trama alguna, es un proceso de búsqueda y revelación.
No se trataría de elegir una dirección sino habitar entre las cuatro, como si se encontrara un sentido místico en el “todo” cuando el pensamiento no se divide, y esto parece que el autor quiere que cada lector lo consiga en la lectura en sí, no entendiendo lo que dice sino por el propio acto de leerla.
De las anteriores novelas que había leído, esa “trilogía” espiritual del caos en un mundo apocalíptico, el autor partía siempre desde una misma obsesión metafísica: la búsqueda de sentido posterior a la caída de toda fe, caótico, en descomposición social y ética, donde los personajes buscan un orden imposible, a través del lenguaje, de la conspiración, del deseo de comprender el desastre. Ahora en esta novela esta idea de búsqueda se depura al máximo (o a su mínima expresión), abandona toda trama, toda sociología, y queda solo la conciencia de comprensión del mundo. Ya no hay comunidad, ni historia, ni salvador, ni posibilidad de redención.
La novela es un paso más allá: el apocalipsis ya ocurrió; el mundo, en lugar de estallar, se disuelve en quietud con una perspectiva muy próxima al zen, no hay trama, el lenguaje es el vehículo que acompasa la búsqueda interior, no hay una relación de acciones que vamos conociendo mientras se narran sino que se sustituye por la atención pura en una lectura espiritual de contemplación.
La entropía como clave, tan característica de Krasznahorkai: la entropía como metáfora metafísica. En el capítulo 41 expresa la clave de la materia caótica o de la entropía como principio creador, “la entropía esencial para la creación de todos los minerales” necesarios en la configuración del planeta, “los silicatos como base de la idea divina”. Toda materia tiende al desorden, pero de ese desorden surgen estructuras nuevas. Las estrellas, el planeta, los minerales, los organismos vivos, se forman gracias a fluctuaciones dentro del caos. La naturaleza se autoorganiza: del desorden emerge el orden. La materia, los silicatos, el polvo, la piedra…, contiene en sí misma el principio creador. En esta visión del mundo el desorden no es un defecto, sino el origen de todo lo que existe.
Desde el inicio de los tiempos, la materia informe contenía toda la armonía futura, por lentísimos procesos naturales, se formaron los minerales, las montañas, los ríos… el mundo físico.
De ahí la expresión de los silicatos como fundamento de la idea divina: el espíritu, lo sagrado, no desciende desde arriba sino que existe en la materia misma, en esa entropía aparentemente ciega que da forma al mundo.
Lo divino no está fuera de la materia, sino en el propio caos que la genera.
Para Krasznahorkai, la creación no es un acto de un ser superior, sino la manifestación del orden dentro del desorden.
En ese libro, el monje, al observar las piedras, las montañas o el polvo, y el lector, cuando lo lee, no busca trascender la materia, sino comprender que la materia misma ya contiene lo sagrado.
Y de ahí esta adaptación oriental tan afín al taoísmo, que conecta en un todo esta idea de la materia divina con la misma idea científica y filosófica. El Tao es una energía indiferenciada que fluye y se transforma constantemente, el caos sería la plenitud original y de ese caos surgen el yin y el yang, ese caos es el estado más completo del ser, del que todo nace y al cual todo vuelve, y Krasznahorkai recoge esta idea, el monje no escapa del mundo terrenal para encontrar lo sagrado, sino que lo encuentra en el propio mundo material, y se reconcilia con el caos como forma del tao, como energía creadora inmanente. Esto conecta con la física científica, el universo evoluciona en procesos de autoorganización, la entropía no destruye el mundo sino que lo impulsa a nuevas formas de creación, la materia no necesita una mente externa que la justifique; los minerales, los silicatos, las montañas, son la huella visible de la creación como energía y caos.
En el camino hacia este jardín seguimos el rastro del proceso cósmico que genera todo lo existente. Esta búsqueda de la iluminación consiste en reconocer que el mundo ya es sagrado en su propia materia.
Es un ejercicio de estilo, no pretende una narración al uso, es muy contemplativa, meditativa, muy zen, en un viaje hacia un templo perdido que convierte el espacio geográfico en un mapa metafísico, yo diría que sobre el deseo de iluminación, e imagino que el título alude a unas coordenadas espirituales (no se trata de un lugar físico sino de una manera de ser simbólica: la permanencia, la profundidad, el aprendizaje, el movimiento). La lectura en sí me ha parecido una práctica espiritual, no hay una narración lineal, no hay una meta final en la que resuelva trama alguna, es un proceso de búsqueda y revelación.
No se trataría de elegir una dirección sino habitar entre las cuatro, como si se encontrara un sentido místico en el “todo” cuando el pensamiento no se divide, y esto parece que el autor quiere que cada lector lo consiga en la lectura en sí, no entendiendo lo que dice sino por el propio acto de leerla.
De las anteriores novelas que había leído, esa “trilogía” espiritual del caos en un mundo apocalíptico, el autor partía siempre desde una misma obsesión metafísica: la búsqueda de sentido posterior a la caída de toda fe, caótico, en descomposición social y ética, donde los personajes buscan un orden imposible, a través del lenguaje, de la conspiración, del deseo de comprender el desastre. Ahora en esta novela esta idea de búsqueda se depura al máximo (o a su mínima expresión), abandona toda trama, toda sociología, y queda solo la conciencia de comprensión del mundo. Ya no hay comunidad, ni historia, ni salvador, ni posibilidad de redención.
La novela es un paso más allá: el apocalipsis ya ocurrió; el mundo, en lugar de estallar, se disuelve en quietud con una perspectiva muy próxima al zen, no hay trama, el lenguaje es el vehículo que acompasa la búsqueda interior, no hay una relación de acciones que vamos conociendo mientras se narran sino que se sustituye por la atención pura en una lectura espiritual de contemplación.
La entropía como clave, tan característica de Krasznahorkai: la entropía como metáfora metafísica. En el capítulo 41 expresa la clave de la materia caótica o de la entropía como principio creador, “la entropía esencial para la creación de todos los minerales” necesarios en la configuración del planeta, “los silicatos como base de la idea divina”. Toda materia tiende al desorden, pero de ese desorden surgen estructuras nuevas. Las estrellas, el planeta, los minerales, los organismos vivos, se forman gracias a fluctuaciones dentro del caos. La naturaleza se autoorganiza: del desorden emerge el orden. La materia, los silicatos, el polvo, la piedra…, contiene en sí misma el principio creador. En esta visión del mundo el desorden no es un defecto, sino el origen de todo lo que existe.
Desde el inicio de los tiempos, la materia informe contenía toda la armonía futura, por lentísimos procesos naturales, se formaron los minerales, las montañas, los ríos… el mundo físico.
De ahí la expresión de los silicatos como fundamento de la idea divina: el espíritu, lo sagrado, no desciende desde arriba sino que existe en la materia misma, en esa entropía aparentemente ciega que da forma al mundo.
Lo divino no está fuera de la materia, sino en el propio caos que la genera.
Para Krasznahorkai, la creación no es un acto de un ser superior, sino la manifestación del orden dentro del desorden.
En ese libro, el monje, al observar las piedras, las montañas o el polvo, y el lector, cuando lo lee, no busca trascender la materia, sino comprender que la materia misma ya contiene lo sagrado.
Y de ahí esta adaptación oriental tan afín al taoísmo, que conecta en un todo esta idea de la materia divina con la misma idea científica y filosófica. El Tao es una energía indiferenciada que fluye y se transforma constantemente, el caos sería la plenitud original y de ese caos surgen el yin y el yang, ese caos es el estado más completo del ser, del que todo nace y al cual todo vuelve, y Krasznahorkai recoge esta idea, el monje no escapa del mundo terrenal para encontrar lo sagrado, sino que lo encuentra en el propio mundo material, y se reconcilia con el caos como forma del tao, como energía creadora inmanente. Esto conecta con la física científica, el universo evoluciona en procesos de autoorganización, la entropía no destruye el mundo sino que lo impulsa a nuevas formas de creación, la materia no necesita una mente externa que la justifique; los minerales, los silicatos, las montañas, son la huella visible de la creación como energía y caos.
En el camino hacia este jardín seguimos el rastro del proceso cósmico que genera todo lo existente. Esta búsqueda de la iluminación consiste en reconocer que el mundo ya es sagrado en su propia materia.
December 8, 2021
Guauu!! Vaya, acabo de cerrar el libro y estoy sin palabras. Es de los libros de los que no tienes una opinión clara al momento de acabarlo y la vas formando con el paso de los días.
Durante su lectura ha pasado por todas las puntuaciones, del 1 (estuve a punto de abandonar a las 20 páginas), hasta el 5, en momentos de una belleza incomparables.
Por intentar concretar un poco, el autor creo que habla en un lenguaje más propio de la poesía que de la prosa, con un estilo zen que he visto en algún escritor oriental, nunca en uno europeo. Esa paciencia, laboriosidad y hacer bien las cosas de la cultura oriental y tan alejado de occidente y nuestras prisas y arrebatos.
El libro no es fácil pero logra transmitirte una paz interior, que ya sólo por eso vale la pena probar la experiencia y dejarse llevar.
Durante su lectura ha pasado por todas las puntuaciones, del 1 (estuve a punto de abandonar a las 20 páginas), hasta el 5, en momentos de una belleza incomparables.
Por intentar concretar un poco, el autor creo que habla en un lenguaje más propio de la poesía que de la prosa, con un estilo zen que he visto en algún escritor oriental, nunca en uno europeo. Esa paciencia, laboriosidad y hacer bien las cosas de la cultura oriental y tan alejado de occidente y nuestras prisas y arrebatos.
El libro no es fácil pero logra transmitirte una paz interior, que ya sólo por eso vale la pena probar la experiencia y dejarse llevar.
June 30, 2022
In front of the entrance to the Hall, he lit incense, reverently standing to the side of the copper cauldron, he folded his hands in prayer, and bowed his head.As I am writing this review, I am reading László Krasznahorkai’s shorter novel for the third time (this time only parts of it) not because there are any problems with the narrative—quite the opposite—but because its manifold contemplative nature invites repeated reading and with each rereading to discover it afresh, uncovering what laid hidden or perhaps not… perhaps it was all the time there but as if each reader is a different mirror on which the text reflects different thoughts. This is my first Krasznahorkai and I am completely smitten with the poetic beauty of his hypnotically meandering writing and the depth of thoughts behind the narrative simplicity.
Then, he said within himself: May the Buddha be merciful, and grant me some light as to where I should seek.
And then he said within himself: May the Buddha be merciful, and tell me if there is any meaning at all to this seeking. (p. 26)
In its structure, the novel is composed of 49 short “chapters” or rather fragments/vignettes numbered as if there are 50 chapters - the first one is missing! More recently in Zambra’s Chilean Poet I encountered a splendid way to finish the novel without the last chapter, “… this ends here, this ends well, the way so many books we love would end if we tore out their final pages.” But by omitting the first chapter and for a good reason, as Krasznahorkai did, takes it to a whole new level. I’ll come back to the missing first chapter later.
If we can talk about any plot, then it’s fairly simple: for centuries a grandson of the Prince of Genji tries to find a hidden garden, the most beautiful one, which this time leads him to a monastery near Kyoto. The only spoiler would be to reveal whether he found it or not, which naturally I would not disclose. That this is an inward journey becomes apparent, or at least to my reading of it, fairly early on, but the question is where we are looking for answers in our existential and spiritual searches. As he is leading the Prince’s grandson through the apparently deserted monastery, Krasznahorkai leads his reader through different corridors of possibilities. And in that sense it’s open to a multitude of interpretations depending on the reader and, even the same reader like myself, may come to different answers on repeated reading. Like the Japanese koans, the novel is enigmatic and on every turn opens up new horizons for contemplation.
After the second reading and after I kept coming back to two episodes—one heartbreaking parable about the dying dog and another hilarious story about the certain Sir Wilford Stanley Gilmore with his Liquidating the Infinite book—I’ve settled on my own interpretation (undoubtedly to be revised if I were to read it the third, fourth… time): seeking the tranquility in the outside finite world (ha, Sir SW Gilmore would be proud of this phrase!) is the road of discontent and ultimately suffering from futile repetitions for the most beautiful garden is hidden inside ourselves…
Now, back to the missing first chapter to see what else this inward journey, magnificently and gently guided by Krasznahorkai, can lead us to fill with our own life answers…
This beautifully written novel demands only the best of talents in rendering it to another language and it was superbly accomplished by Ottilie Mulzet.
My thanks to New Directions and Edelweiss for an ARC.
February 25, 2023
Este libro es una exquisitez. Escrito por un húngaro pero con el estilo de la tradición japonesa del detalle. De hecho, está ambientado en Japón y nos cuenta la búsqueda de un jardín secreto en un monasterio budista. Eso y algunas cosas más que no son tan fáciles de conectar racionalmente, pero que tienen su conexión profunda y sutil. Casi todo es descripción minuciosa de lo que se ve, las calles, la estructura arquitectónica, los árboles, las plantas, la figura de Buda... Es simple y complejo a la vez. Hay que leerlo con otro ritmo, con dedicación y pausa. Un tipo de escritura que rompe el canon occidental, y que es preciosista a su modo oriental. Quienes hayan leído literatura japonesa lo entenderán. Krasznahorkai intenta mimetizarse con ella y lo logra.
October 11, 2025
Die traurige Heiterkeit der japanischen Ästhetik einzufangen, mit samt ihrem Vermögen, einen Moment in der Vergänglichkeit der Dinge festzuhalten, das ist László Krasznahorkai auf nur 150 Seiten eindrucksvoll gelungen.
Die Geschichte beginnt mit Kapitel II - das erste Kapitel fehlt - und der erste Satz versetzt uns in die Zukunft, denn die Schnellbahn der Kaihan Linie läuft nicht auf Schienen, sondern auf einer einzigen immensen Messerschneide.
Im Südosten von Kyoto steigt der Enkel des Prinzen Genji aus der Schnellbahn. Er wandert durch ausgestorbene Straßen zu einem Kloster, auf der Suche nach dem schönsten Garten der Welt.
Sein Großvater, der Prinz von Genji ist die Hauptfigur eines uralten Romans, Die Geschichte vom Prinzen Genji , der Hofdame Murasaki Shikibu (ca. 978–1014) zugeschrieben. Sein Enkel müsste demnach schon viele hundert Jahre alt sein. Krasznahorkai widmet seinem Aussehen ein eigenes Kapitel und beschreibt ihn als eine außergewöhnliche Schönheit und von ewiger Jugend.
Der Enkel des Prinzen von Genji wandert lange durch die Klosteranlage auf der Suche nach dem Garten, und es fühlt sich an, als wäre die ganze Szenerie einfach aus der Zeit gefallen. Das Kloster ist ebenso menschenleer und verlassen wie die Straßen und Gärten, trotzdem bleibt der Eindruck, es wäre wenige Augenblicke vorher noch alles mit Leben erfüllt gewesen.
Im Dickicht eines Stechapfelstrauchs, der sich um den Stamm eines Ginkobaums windet, ist in der Zwischenzeit ein halb zu Tode geprügelter Hund gestorben.
Der Enkel des Prinzen von Genji tritt ins Privatgemach des Abtes. Dort brennt noch eine Lampe, halbvolle Whiskygläser stehen auf dem Tisch und der Boden ist verwüstet mit Plastiktüten, Geschirr und Abfällen. Auf einem Regal steht ein 2000 Seiten dickes Buch mit dem Titel Das Unendliche, ein Irrtum von Sir Wilford Stanley Gilmore. Es besteht nur aus arabischen Zahlen.
Es ist erstaunlich, wie mühelos Krasznahorkai eine gänzlich unwirkliche und trotzdem beängstigend konkrete Atmosphäre erzeugt. Es sind die winzigen und unscheinbaren Dinge, die mit großer Aufmerksamkeit beleuchtet werden. Sie bilden in ihrer Gemeinsamkeit das unermessliche Ganze. Die Stille und Unbeweglichkeit wird immer wieder durch minimale, aber beunruhigende Irritationen gestört. Ein kaum wahrnehmbares Erdbeben, unerklärliche Brandspuren an der Schatzkammer, der Enkel des Prinzen von Genji erleidet Anfälle von Schwindel.
Die 49 kurzen Kapitel erscheinen wie kleine, sorgfältige Tuschezeichnungen, jedes für sich eine stimmige, in sich geschlossene Form aus Sätzen und Worten. Viele davon sind nur äußerst detaillierte Beschreibungen eines Teils der Architektur oder eines Gegenstands und werden so zu einer Kontemplation über ein ganzes Universum, das im Entstehungsprozess eines jeden dieser Gegenstände steckt.
Der formalen Strenge stehen die klaren und fließenden Worte gegenüber, die nur die Anmutung des Augenblicks ausdrücken, ohne einen darüber hinausreichenden Sinn zu hinterlassen. Der Versuch einer Interpretation würde die Klarheit des Augenblicks zerstören, nur so wie es ist, bleibt dieses Meisterwerk rätselhaft wie ein Koan und berührend wie ein Haiku.
PS: (10.10.2025) Nach der Nobelpreisverleihung, die mich als ganz großer Verehrer Krasznahorkais besonders gefreut hat, sind mir seine Bücher - ich glaube, es waren neun, die ich gelesen habe, nochmals durch den Kopf gegangen. Jedes davon ist anders und auf seine Weise großartig; dieses hat den nachhaltigsten Eindruck hinterlassen.
Die Geschichte beginnt mit Kapitel II - das erste Kapitel fehlt - und der erste Satz versetzt uns in die Zukunft, denn die Schnellbahn der Kaihan Linie läuft nicht auf Schienen, sondern auf einer einzigen immensen Messerschneide.
Im Südosten von Kyoto steigt der Enkel des Prinzen Genji aus der Schnellbahn. Er wandert durch ausgestorbene Straßen zu einem Kloster, auf der Suche nach dem schönsten Garten der Welt.
Sein Großvater, der Prinz von Genji ist die Hauptfigur eines uralten Romans, Die Geschichte vom Prinzen Genji , der Hofdame Murasaki Shikibu (ca. 978–1014) zugeschrieben. Sein Enkel müsste demnach schon viele hundert Jahre alt sein. Krasznahorkai widmet seinem Aussehen ein eigenes Kapitel und beschreibt ihn als eine außergewöhnliche Schönheit und von ewiger Jugend.
Der Enkel des Prinzen von Genji wandert lange durch die Klosteranlage auf der Suche nach dem Garten, und es fühlt sich an, als wäre die ganze Szenerie einfach aus der Zeit gefallen. Das Kloster ist ebenso menschenleer und verlassen wie die Straßen und Gärten, trotzdem bleibt der Eindruck, es wäre wenige Augenblicke vorher noch alles mit Leben erfüllt gewesen.
Im Dickicht eines Stechapfelstrauchs, der sich um den Stamm eines Ginkobaums windet, ist in der Zwischenzeit ein halb zu Tode geprügelter Hund gestorben.
Der Enkel des Prinzen von Genji tritt ins Privatgemach des Abtes. Dort brennt noch eine Lampe, halbvolle Whiskygläser stehen auf dem Tisch und der Boden ist verwüstet mit Plastiktüten, Geschirr und Abfällen. Auf einem Regal steht ein 2000 Seiten dickes Buch mit dem Titel Das Unendliche, ein Irrtum von Sir Wilford Stanley Gilmore. Es besteht nur aus arabischen Zahlen.
Es ist erstaunlich, wie mühelos Krasznahorkai eine gänzlich unwirkliche und trotzdem beängstigend konkrete Atmosphäre erzeugt. Es sind die winzigen und unscheinbaren Dinge, die mit großer Aufmerksamkeit beleuchtet werden. Sie bilden in ihrer Gemeinsamkeit das unermessliche Ganze. Die Stille und Unbeweglichkeit wird immer wieder durch minimale, aber beunruhigende Irritationen gestört. Ein kaum wahrnehmbares Erdbeben, unerklärliche Brandspuren an der Schatzkammer, der Enkel des Prinzen von Genji erleidet Anfälle von Schwindel.
Die 49 kurzen Kapitel erscheinen wie kleine, sorgfältige Tuschezeichnungen, jedes für sich eine stimmige, in sich geschlossene Form aus Sätzen und Worten. Viele davon sind nur äußerst detaillierte Beschreibungen eines Teils der Architektur oder eines Gegenstands und werden so zu einer Kontemplation über ein ganzes Universum, das im Entstehungsprozess eines jeden dieser Gegenstände steckt.
Der formalen Strenge stehen die klaren und fließenden Worte gegenüber, die nur die Anmutung des Augenblicks ausdrücken, ohne einen darüber hinausreichenden Sinn zu hinterlassen. Der Versuch einer Interpretation würde die Klarheit des Augenblicks zerstören, nur so wie es ist, bleibt dieses Meisterwerk rätselhaft wie ein Koan und berührend wie ein Haiku.
PS: (10.10.2025) Nach der Nobelpreisverleihung, die mich als ganz großer Verehrer Krasznahorkais besonders gefreut hat, sind mir seine Bücher - ich glaube, es waren neun, die ich gelesen habe, nochmals durch den Kopf gegangen. Jedes davon ist anders und auf seine Weise großartig; dieses hat den nachhaltigsten Eindruck hinterlassen.
October 10, 2025
Now worthy winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2025
Life between Myth and Immediacy
No other writer is as capable of an exploration of raw existence as Krasznahorkai. Other novels I’ve read by him plumb the darkest depths of the human soul. Which is why this little gem, a celebration of life as a wonder, came as a breathtakingly lovely surprise.
Written in Krasznahorkai’s characteristic urgent streams of consciousness punctuated only to let the reader breathe, it consists of fifty songs or chapters numbered with Roman numerals starting from II. Where has the first chapter gone? It’s elsewhere, probably in the Tale of Genji, which is presumed to be the first novel in the world. The lead character is the only one that has a name, but then he doesn’t really have one, either: he is referred to as the grandson of Prince Genji.
Driven by insatiable desire (another recurring interest of this writer), this elusive character embarks on a journey to find the most beautiful garden in the world, hidden in a monastery. As expected in a Krasznahorkai novel, a train will be the means of transport. He is an excellent guide, and takes us through wondrous descriptions of the monastery, of its origins, of time. He finds the place, but he doesn’t find the garden, just like in Tarkovsky’s Stalker the Room in the Zone that grants the heart’s desires, or perhaps Canaan for Moses, will not be entered.
The grandson of Prince Genji functions as a symbol of the writer or even of literature. He can take the reader on an existential journey, but cannot find the garden himself. But we the readers do get a lavish description of the garden. How is this possible? The novel hints at a remarkable answer.
Our mysterious guide finds a book in the monastery, a mathematical writing that insults a number of mathematicians who I assume contributed to the theory of infinity, more emphatically Georg Cantor who provided an infinity proof. After slandering these theoretical attempts at grasping the miracle which is infinity, in a later chapter the narrator himself addresses infinity, but completely differently. The millions of millions are orders of magnitude that are possible indeed, but they belong to the realm of destruction and non-existence. In millions of millions of cases, the seedlings of the hinoki cypress disappear in the processes of nature, of the soil (for comparison, The Melancholy of Resistance ends with a description of human decomposition, as well; in that earlier work, this process marks the end, with no resurrection in sight, as Krasznahorkai bares existence to its very invisible and indivisible components). But in eight specific cases they do not, they grow into adulthood, to be admired by everyone who finds the garden.
The wonder of life is not abstract. It is an utterly personal experience, in an immediacy and uniqueness that defy any need for proof. According to the writer's confession (see comment below), this luminous book was inspired, nay, produced by such an experience.
Life between Myth and Immediacy
No other writer is as capable of an exploration of raw existence as Krasznahorkai. Other novels I’ve read by him plumb the darkest depths of the human soul. Which is why this little gem, a celebration of life as a wonder, came as a breathtakingly lovely surprise.
Written in Krasznahorkai’s characteristic urgent streams of consciousness punctuated only to let the reader breathe, it consists of fifty songs or chapters numbered with Roman numerals starting from II. Where has the first chapter gone? It’s elsewhere, probably in the Tale of Genji, which is presumed to be the first novel in the world. The lead character is the only one that has a name, but then he doesn’t really have one, either: he is referred to as the grandson of Prince Genji.
Driven by insatiable desire (another recurring interest of this writer), this elusive character embarks on a journey to find the most beautiful garden in the world, hidden in a monastery. As expected in a Krasznahorkai novel, a train will be the means of transport. He is an excellent guide, and takes us through wondrous descriptions of the monastery, of its origins, of time. He finds the place, but he doesn’t find the garden, just like in Tarkovsky’s Stalker the Room in the Zone that grants the heart’s desires, or perhaps Canaan for Moses, will not be entered.
The grandson of Prince Genji functions as a symbol of the writer or even of literature. He can take the reader on an existential journey, but cannot find the garden himself. But we the readers do get a lavish description of the garden. How is this possible? The novel hints at a remarkable answer.
Our mysterious guide finds a book in the monastery, a mathematical writing that insults a number of mathematicians who I assume contributed to the theory of infinity, more emphatically Georg Cantor who provided an infinity proof. After slandering these theoretical attempts at grasping the miracle which is infinity, in a later chapter the narrator himself addresses infinity, but completely differently. The millions of millions are orders of magnitude that are possible indeed, but they belong to the realm of destruction and non-existence. In millions of millions of cases, the seedlings of the hinoki cypress disappear in the processes of nature, of the soil (for comparison, The Melancholy of Resistance ends with a description of human decomposition, as well; in that earlier work, this process marks the end, with no resurrection in sight, as Krasznahorkai bares existence to its very invisible and indivisible components). But in eight specific cases they do not, they grow into adulthood, to be admired by everyone who finds the garden.
The wonder of life is not abstract. It is an utterly personal experience, in an immediacy and uniqueness that defy any need for proof. According to the writer's confession (see comment below), this luminous book was inspired, nay, produced by such an experience.
January 20, 2025
Still, descriptive, soporific, at best maybe kinda meta at times, quietly ruthless, unique, exaggerated (the chapter describing the book of numbers), mythic, reverentially Japanophiliac in a way Krasznahorkai can pull off without seeming creepy or reductive, studded with moments of striking weirdness, a secret garden of a book in itself, ancient, isolated, fragile, just on the other side of magic. Had decided to lay off Krasznahorkai for a while and probably wasn’t quite ready to return to him but received a recommendation from Arlo and went for it. Read it slowly, a chapter a night, until today, reading the final fifty pages in a sitting in bed on a snow-bright Sunday. I respect Krasznahorkai and would like to like him more than I do but I tend to resist adoption of his technologies. A beautiful paperback with flaps -- and one of the coolest recent cover designs.
October 9, 2025
From the winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature
... in all of its permutations, tradition remained alive until the end, even in the case of the last prepared exemplar, tradition was the exclusive operational guide: namely the book, just as the treasures of this kyōzō, had been brought to life by tradition, and it was tradition that sustained it, which, in point of fact, meant nothing else than the imitation—disciplined, and yet always natural and flexible—of instruction based on experience, it meant nothing else than the most consistent procedures and masters, and finally, a simple trust in the presence of tradition: that this tradition was built upon observation, repetition, and the veneration of the inner order of nature and the nature of things, and that neither the meaning nor the purity of this tradition could ever be brought into question
A Mountain to the North, A Lake to The South, Paths to the West, A River to the East is Ottilie Mulzet's translation of László Krasznahorkai's Északról hegy, délről tó, nyugatról hegyek, keletről folyó.
In the original this appeared in 2003, although in English it has been published after many of the author's subsequent novels, notably Seiobo There Below (original Seiobo járt odalent, 2008) which, for me, perfects the form Krasznahorkai explores here. Indeed as the author told (the brilliant writer in his own right) Mauro Javier Cárdenas in Music and Literature in 2013 "perhaps in Seiobo There Below, perhaps in this book I’ve reached my maximum of this desire for beauty in the sentences."
In the same interview Krasznahorkai explained:
And this sense of perfection, repetition and a careful, painstaking, approach is at the heart of this book, told in 50 short chapters over 130 generously spaced pages.
It is based around Prince Genji's grandson, a character out of time, who arrives in modern-day Kyoto after the culmination of a centuries-long search for the perfect garden.
In a city strangely deserted of people (hard not to see the influence of Krasznahorkai's friend Sebald) here he finds and explores the remains of a huge and beautifully crafted temple:
Arching across the valley, the wooden bridge came to an end, and yet nothing else began, the wall simply continued, unornamented, painted white, constructed from thick, dense mud bricks, and above, at its top, two rows of turquoise roof tiles bid against each other; he went on, persevering, looking for an entrance, and all the while he had the sense that the unyielding insularity and immutability of this wall running along to his left not only served to signal the presence of an enormous plot of land, but to inform him: this was no mere wall, but the inner dimension of something, which merely intended, with this evocation, to it the one arriving that very soon other units of measurement would be required than the ones to which he'd been accustomed; other ratios than the ones hitherto enclosing his life would now be determinative.
Although, admiring the stunning workmanship, and in desperate need of a glass of water, manages to miss the seemingly modest entrance to the perfect garden. Much of the novel has Krasznahorkai telling us of the craft that went into the construction of the temple, for example the way that the master carpenter selects, from a distant mountain, the hinoki cypress treesthat will make up the buildings many, many years before they are ready to harvested and watches them grow until the time is right, and when he does cut them down first makes them a vow that they will exchange their life to be part of a beautiful and enduring creation.
Other plot lines and motifs include the Prince's grandson's drunken acolytes attempting to find him, a dying dog, goldfish nailed to a tree, and, most delightfully for me, the discovery of a 2000-page mathematical textbook The Infinite Mistake by (the apparently French!) Sir Wilford Stanley Gilmore, a tome that purports to prove that there is such a thing as the largest possible finite number, and that Cantor was wrong:
At the very end of his book, there is a brief Note, in which the author, with coarse words of varying strength and of varying registers, but in every case accompanied by extraordinarily obscene expressions, curses the following mathematicians, in the first place a certain Georg Cantor, then Bolzano, Dedekind, Frege, Zermelo, Fraenkel, Brouwer, Whitehead, and Paul Cohen all get what's coming to them, so that then the author, with the harshest of words, tears into a certain David Hilbert, where in nearly every sentence there figures such expres-sions as "fuck you," "your mother," "shit," and other similarly crude expressions, in the end returning again and again to one single name, but returning to it with indefatigable, inexhaustible rage, the name of Georg Cantor, the author's wrath boiling over if he so much as mentions Cantor's name, it is perceptible between the lines as the blood rushes to his head, because Cantor, he writes, is the one who - despite the precautions of a certain sober-minded Kronecker - sealed the intellectual world of the West, the history of the scandalously limited scientific thinking of the West—he, this unfortunate Platonist, this pitiful God-believer, this deranged person suffering from serious depression, managed to convince this limited Western world that the infinite exists, that the infinite is itself a part of reality, he, this Georg Cantor, who does not even deserve—as he writes in the last line of his book for his name to be forgotten.
Kronecker, Cantor's rival and detractor, of course famous for his reported words Die ganzen Zahlen hat der liebe Gott gemacht, alles andere ist Menschenwerk ("God made the integers, all else is the work of man").
A beautifully written novel and a long-overdue addition to the author's work available in English.
... in all of its permutations, tradition remained alive until the end, even in the case of the last prepared exemplar, tradition was the exclusive operational guide: namely the book, just as the treasures of this kyōzō, had been brought to life by tradition, and it was tradition that sustained it, which, in point of fact, meant nothing else than the imitation—disciplined, and yet always natural and flexible—of instruction based on experience, it meant nothing else than the most consistent procedures and masters, and finally, a simple trust in the presence of tradition: that this tradition was built upon observation, repetition, and the veneration of the inner order of nature and the nature of things, and that neither the meaning nor the purity of this tradition could ever be brought into question
A Mountain to the North, A Lake to The South, Paths to the West, A River to the East is Ottilie Mulzet's translation of László Krasznahorkai's Északról hegy, délről tó, nyugatról hegyek, keletről folyó.
In the original this appeared in 2003, although in English it has been published after many of the author's subsequent novels, notably Seiobo There Below (original Seiobo járt odalent, 2008) which, for me, perfects the form Krasznahorkai explores here. Indeed as the author told (the brilliant writer in his own right) Mauro Javier Cárdenas in Music and Literature in 2013 "perhaps in Seiobo There Below, perhaps in this book I’ve reached my maximum of this desire for beauty in the sentences."
In the same interview Krasznahorkai explained:
When I was first in East Asia, in China and in Japan—and I went back again and again, actually for more than ten years I went back again and again—the only one thing that I could somehow understand, rather, guess at, was eternity. This is not an abstract idea, but this is an everyday reality. Many times I watched workers who built sacred places, monasteries, churches, in the Buddhist areas in Japan and it became more and more important to me to see how they work, namely, why is it so terribly important that a wood, a piece of wood, be so smooth, so absolutely without mistakes, I watched the workers and I didn’t understand because I thought that this was already perfect, but this was not perfect enough for him, I tried to see, I tried to understand why it was so important to make the same movement until I understood, or guessed, that it was absolutely not important what happened with the wood, the only thing that was important was the repetition of the movement, and this perfection of the piece of wood was only a consequence of this repetition, of this movement. Actually, I tried to understand, and perhaps I could understand eternity in a very simple way, namely, by watching somebody, the workers, the woman, somewhere, who made the same movements, absolutely the same movements...
And this sense of perfection, repetition and a careful, painstaking, approach is at the heart of this book, told in 50 short chapters over 130 generously spaced pages.
It is based around Prince Genji's grandson, a character out of time, who arrives in modern-day Kyoto after the culmination of a centuries-long search for the perfect garden.
In a city strangely deserted of people (hard not to see the influence of Krasznahorkai's friend Sebald) here he finds and explores the remains of a huge and beautifully crafted temple:
Arching across the valley, the wooden bridge came to an end, and yet nothing else began, the wall simply continued, unornamented, painted white, constructed from thick, dense mud bricks, and above, at its top, two rows of turquoise roof tiles bid against each other; he went on, persevering, looking for an entrance, and all the while he had the sense that the unyielding insularity and immutability of this wall running along to his left not only served to signal the presence of an enormous plot of land, but to inform him: this was no mere wall, but the inner dimension of something, which merely intended, with this evocation, to it the one arriving that very soon other units of measurement would be required than the ones to which he'd been accustomed; other ratios than the ones hitherto enclosing his life would now be determinative.
Although, admiring the stunning workmanship, and in desperate need of a glass of water, manages to miss the seemingly modest entrance to the perfect garden. Much of the novel has Krasznahorkai telling us of the craft that went into the construction of the temple, for example the way that the master carpenter selects, from a distant mountain, the hinoki cypress treesthat will make up the buildings many, many years before they are ready to harvested and watches them grow until the time is right, and when he does cut them down first makes them a vow that they will exchange their life to be part of a beautiful and enduring creation.
Other plot lines and motifs include the Prince's grandson's drunken acolytes attempting to find him, a dying dog, goldfish nailed to a tree, and, most delightfully for me, the discovery of a 2000-page mathematical textbook The Infinite Mistake by (the apparently French!) Sir Wilford Stanley Gilmore, a tome that purports to prove that there is such a thing as the largest possible finite number, and that Cantor was wrong:
At the very end of his book, there is a brief Note, in which the author, with coarse words of varying strength and of varying registers, but in every case accompanied by extraordinarily obscene expressions, curses the following mathematicians, in the first place a certain Georg Cantor, then Bolzano, Dedekind, Frege, Zermelo, Fraenkel, Brouwer, Whitehead, and Paul Cohen all get what's coming to them, so that then the author, with the harshest of words, tears into a certain David Hilbert, where in nearly every sentence there figures such expres-sions as "fuck you," "your mother," "shit," and other similarly crude expressions, in the end returning again and again to one single name, but returning to it with indefatigable, inexhaustible rage, the name of Georg Cantor, the author's wrath boiling over if he so much as mentions Cantor's name, it is perceptible between the lines as the blood rushes to his head, because Cantor, he writes, is the one who - despite the precautions of a certain sober-minded Kronecker - sealed the intellectual world of the West, the history of the scandalously limited scientific thinking of the West—he, this unfortunate Platonist, this pitiful God-believer, this deranged person suffering from serious depression, managed to convince this limited Western world that the infinite exists, that the infinite is itself a part of reality, he, this Georg Cantor, who does not even deserve—as he writes in the last line of his book for his name to be forgotten.
Kronecker, Cantor's rival and detractor, of course famous for his reported words Die ganzen Zahlen hat der liebe Gott gemacht, alles andere ist Menschenwerk ("God made the integers, all else is the work of man").
A beautifully written novel and a long-overdue addition to the author's work available in English.
January 2, 2024
More than just a reading experience. A passage to begin.
“it dreamt that in the things and the processes, existing in their inconceivable, ghastly velocity, enclosed within a seemingly interminable constraint of flashes of light and cessation, there was yet a dazzling constancy as deep as the impotency of words before an unintelligible land of inaccessible beauty, something like the bleak succession of the myriad of waves in the ocean’s gigantic distance, something like a monastery courtyard where, in the peacefulness of a surface evenly covered with white gravel, carefully smoothed over with a rake, a very frightened pair of eyes, a gaze fallen into mania, a shattered brain could rest, could experience the sudden enlivening of an ancient thought of obscure content, and at once begin to see that there was only the whole, and no parts.”
The grandson of Prince Genji makes his way toward a monastery. He hopes for resonance, I believe, and some form of earthly enlightenment. He looks for a garden. At the centre of this journey and this book, there is nothing less than an attempt to lay out infinity and the concept of complex, chaotic systems. Biology and Buddhism, right next to the idea of zygotes and gametes and a 1 followed by every zero in the universe. Followed by a 1. Then a 2. Then a 3. And on. Also at the centre, a monastery that has to have a mountain to the north, a lake to the south, paths to the west, and a river to the east.
I know there is more of this as well, seeing as how this book was initially published in 2003 and is not too far in makeup from Seiobo There Below. Hell yeah. And here is another passage to end.
“in the end, eight enormous trees grew, eight enormous, wondrous hinoki cypress trees in a monastery courtyard, like the emissaries of an edifying sentence arriving from a great distance, with a message spreading among their roots, in their straight trunks, and the fine lacework of their foliage, a message in their story and in their existence, a message which no one shall ever understand — for its comprehension was, very visibly, not intended for human beings.”
“it dreamt that in the things and the processes, existing in their inconceivable, ghastly velocity, enclosed within a seemingly interminable constraint of flashes of light and cessation, there was yet a dazzling constancy as deep as the impotency of words before an unintelligible land of inaccessible beauty, something like the bleak succession of the myriad of waves in the ocean’s gigantic distance, something like a monastery courtyard where, in the peacefulness of a surface evenly covered with white gravel, carefully smoothed over with a rake, a very frightened pair of eyes, a gaze fallen into mania, a shattered brain could rest, could experience the sudden enlivening of an ancient thought of obscure content, and at once begin to see that there was only the whole, and no parts.”
The grandson of Prince Genji makes his way toward a monastery. He hopes for resonance, I believe, and some form of earthly enlightenment. He looks for a garden. At the centre of this journey and this book, there is nothing less than an attempt to lay out infinity and the concept of complex, chaotic systems. Biology and Buddhism, right next to the idea of zygotes and gametes and a 1 followed by every zero in the universe. Followed by a 1. Then a 2. Then a 3. And on. Also at the centre, a monastery that has to have a mountain to the north, a lake to the south, paths to the west, and a river to the east.
I know there is more of this as well, seeing as how this book was initially published in 2003 and is not too far in makeup from Seiobo There Below. Hell yeah. And here is another passage to end.
“in the end, eight enormous trees grew, eight enormous, wondrous hinoki cypress trees in a monastery courtyard, like the emissaries of an edifying sentence arriving from a great distance, with a message spreading among their roots, in their straight trunks, and the fine lacework of their foliage, a message in their story and in their existence, a message which no one shall ever understand — for its comprehension was, very visibly, not intended for human beings.”
February 20, 2022
Extraño, hermoso y complejo libro.
Durante más de media lectura lo he leído mal. Esas referencias al “nieto del príncipe Genji” no las he sabido pillar hasta estar el libro muy avanzado. Al principio, pensé que no encajaban; luego he pensado que las utiliza como un icono de la literatura y la cultura japonesa, algo así como un japonés podría utilizar a Goethe para hablarnos de la cultura alemana. Lo que no me encajaba es que yo asocio (y recuerdo) a Genji como a un personaje arrastrado a una vorágine de deseo, y el nieto no ha salido en eso a su abuelo. Su utilización es una excusa, más bien, pese al pequeño retrato que le hace casi al final.
Se trata de un libro místico-orientalista, hermosamente escrito, en el que en apariencia no pasa nada: está el nieto del príncipe Genji, un monasterio junto a una montaña, la estación del tren, etcétera, pero poco más. Sin embargo, su verdadero tema es el infinito, ¡ahí es nada!, y la imposibilidad para los humanos (que parten del sentido finito de la realidad) de atisbar, no ya comprender, sino solo atisbar, ese infinito.
Como no soy un gran versado en conocimientos budistas ciertas referencias del texto se me pierden; pero he aquí que el capítulo matemático (y no digo más para no contar demasiado) me ha llevado a cierta comprensión de lo que pretendía el autor. Esa escena y la del polen son magistrales.
Es un libro raro, hermoso y profundo. En cierta medida me da alegría que existan escritores así, tan buenos y tan locos como para escribir sobre este tipo de cosas.
Su prosa asemeja a las luces que emiten un enjambre de luciérnagas: al principio solo aprecias destellos, y luego te quedas deslumbrado.
Una lectura difícil, pero interesante y bella.
Durante más de media lectura lo he leído mal. Esas referencias al “nieto del príncipe Genji” no las he sabido pillar hasta estar el libro muy avanzado. Al principio, pensé que no encajaban; luego he pensado que las utiliza como un icono de la literatura y la cultura japonesa, algo así como un japonés podría utilizar a Goethe para hablarnos de la cultura alemana. Lo que no me encajaba es que yo asocio (y recuerdo) a Genji como a un personaje arrastrado a una vorágine de deseo, y el nieto no ha salido en eso a su abuelo. Su utilización es una excusa, más bien, pese al pequeño retrato que le hace casi al final.
Se trata de un libro místico-orientalista, hermosamente escrito, en el que en apariencia no pasa nada: está el nieto del príncipe Genji, un monasterio junto a una montaña, la estación del tren, etcétera, pero poco más. Sin embargo, su verdadero tema es el infinito, ¡ahí es nada!, y la imposibilidad para los humanos (que parten del sentido finito de la realidad) de atisbar, no ya comprender, sino solo atisbar, ese infinito.
Como no soy un gran versado en conocimientos budistas ciertas referencias del texto se me pierden; pero he aquí que el capítulo matemático (y no digo más para no contar demasiado) me ha llevado a cierta comprensión de lo que pretendía el autor. Esa escena y la del polen son magistrales.
Es un libro raro, hermoso y profundo. En cierta medida me da alegría que existan escritores así, tan buenos y tan locos como para escribir sobre este tipo de cosas.
Su prosa asemeja a las luces que emiten un enjambre de luciérnagas: al principio solo aprecias destellos, y luego te quedas deslumbrado.
Una lectura difícil, pero interesante y bella.
November 15, 2022
this was no mere wall, but the inner dimension of something, which merely intended, with this evocation, to alert the one arriving that very soon other units of measurement would be required than the ones to which he'd been accustomed; other ratios than the ones hitherto enclosing his life would now be determinative.a meditative, almost achingly beautiful work, lászló krasznahorkai's a mountain to the north, a lake to the south, paths to the west, a river to the east (északról hegy, délről tó, nyugatról hegyek, keletről folyó) is a tale slight on action, but swarming with atmosphere. written some two decades ago, a mountain to the north follows the grandson of prince genji as he seeks a fabled garden outside of kyoto.
the buddha turned his beautiful gaze away so that he would not have to look, so he would not have to see, so he would not have to be aware of what was in front of himself, in three directions—this wretched world.the hungarian master, across 49 chapters (2-50, omitting the first), envelops his readers in a lyrical wandering, an awestruck exploration of a monastery that nearly seems irrealistically enchanted. with spellbinding description, krasznahorkai thoroughly details the monastery and its environs, focusing deeply on the abounding wonder of its landscape and architectural origins — while drawing inevitably closer to the enigmatic garden within.
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.perhaps most similar to seiobo there below in tone and temperament, a mountain to the north is quite nearly an exercise in reverence. time, nature, color, being, form, structure, mathematics, a flourishing daydream both within and without the human realm. krasznahorkai continually astonishes, herein this time with an almost plaintive inventory of gardenly delights, one just barely beyond human comprehension and possession.
in brief, they could be seen in the world, and heard, and they could be felt there, only they were nowhere, because although everything pointed at them—movement, sound, and fragrance—it was not possible to point at them and say they existed and there they were, because their existence always proceeded in the haunting domain of the most profound indirectness, because they were palpable, but unattainable, because they were present, but ungraspable, because they were existence themselves while they themselves were excluded from existence, namely they were so close to existence that they had become identical with it, and existence can never be seen, so that, well, if they were here even when they were not here, nothing ever remained of them, only the yearning for them to come, only the fear that they would come, only the memory that they had been here, but the most painful thing of all—the grandson of prince genji looked up at the sky—was that the one who had once been here would never return.
*translated from the hungarian by ottilie mulzet (borbély, drágoman, földényi, schein, et al.)
October 29, 2025
‘—amid the dense branches of a tall azalea bush, a fox infected with rabies crouched, ready to jump. Both of its eyes were open: it did not blink at all. And in these numbing, motionless, troubled, crimson eyes, there was nothing else apart from burning frenzy. Evening fell. The magnolia trees slowly drew together their enormous petals.’
Enjoyed all things arboreal and botanical in this one. Lost me at 'Prince Genji' (who I found dull and almost irrelevant/disposable) though - has it got anything to do with Murasaki Shikibu? If not, I don't know if I'm (or if I will ever be) even interested, but brilliant descriptions nonetheless, spectacular setting, incredibly attractive and engaging literary style and structure. Would be hard to think that this would be my last Krasznahorkai (really doubt so), and (although I don't have anything else to compare to to/with) I'm glad this was my first one.
‘This fairy-tale-like story, namely, was true, although it would be more fortunate to speak about how all of this—from the hinoki forest near Taishan to the trees of the Kyoto monastery, standing, still alive, in the out-of-the-way courtyard—was instead the story of a miracle, dazzlingly terrifying and numbingly incomprehensible, for the entire process really only spoke of how there rose, into the path of this rising pollen cloud, in the most literal sense of the word, millions and millions of obstacles, of how, again and again, from this one hundred billion grains of pollen, millions and millions were destroyed over and over, millions and millions again and again, because it was only and exclusively obstacles and tribulations that piled up before the goals of this great migration, namely fatal obstacles and ruinous tribulations, for these one hundred billion grains of pollen, whose purpose was the further transmission of life, these one hundred billion male gametes, invisible to the naked eye, simple, and spherically shaped, were in reality exposed to unceasing assaults of murderous happenstance to such a degree that there, in the small hinoki forest located in the center of China’s Shandong Province, it was completely unfathomable that, out of this one hundred billion grains of pollen, even one tiny orphaned hinoki pollen grain should reach its goal in the out-of-the-way courtyard of the monastery in Kyoto in order to fertilize even one single pistillate cell among the fertile flowering cones.
For this cloud of pollen, the world had become an unpredictable maze with an inconceivably complex structure of hazardous channels, in which everything, in the strictest sense of the word, strove to destroy it—for that was all it took—actually reached its goal, and then what it had been intended for could occur: the pollen grains burrowed in between the cone scales, and awaited favorable conditions there—first and foremost warmth—for these pores to reach the micropyle, and then, releasing the pollen tube and finally gaining the inner substance of the ovulum, breaching it and, uniting with the ovum, a new life, of neutral gender, was brought forth, that seed was brought forth which, after ripening—a process lasting approximately one year—possessed, without exception, every characteristic of the hinoki tree it would grow into, the entire future plant, and from this point on the common story of this one hundred billion grains of pollen and this single hinoki tree was much, but much less dramatic, because the dangers awaiting the seeds were incomparably fewer—after their spring ripening, and that is what happened here, from the approximately ten million seeds that had ripened, altogether eight seeds not only fell in a propitious spot, but directly on the very best spot possible, onto a so-called nurse tree located nearby, onto the nearly completely decayed trunk of a Norway spruce, the very best spot, because here was the greatest conceivable protection for a hinoki seed, for the germination and birth of the seedling, the tiny plant could proceed without any greater danger—after the mild weather, a wintry cold, and if snow fell onto the frail plants, breaking their stalks—the end.
The torrential raindrops could also be fateful due to their weight as they plunged down onto the seedlings, striking them down to the ground: they would straighten up again, but then another enormous raindrop could dash the seedling right to the ground—fungi and bacteria awaited the execution of the final task, the dirty work, the mopping up—and this happened in millions and millions of cases, but it did not occur in eight cases, here, just a few steps away from the mother plant, for, from these eight little plants—surviving every further peril—in the end, eight enormous trees grew, eight enormous, wondrous hinoki cypress trees in a monastery courtyard, like the emissaries of an edifying sentence arriving from a great distance, with a message spreading among their roots, in their straight trunks, and the fine lacework of their foliage, a message in their story and in their existence, a message which no one shall ever understand—for its comprehension was, very visibly, not intended for human beings.’
February 22, 2024
15th book for 2024.
This is a short novella, 130 pages, 49 chapters.
It's hard to review this book without doing violence to the work. On the surface it tells in short chapters and long sentences, about the visit of the grandson of Prince Genji—a person out of time—who is searching for the most beautiful garden in the World, which he has read exists in a forgotten part of a large Buddhist monastery. He slips his drunken retinue, enters the monastery, feels sick, walks past the garden he has been looking for, gets a glass of water, falls asleep in the library, wakes refreshed, is horrified to discover the very non-Buddhist abbot's quarters, and goes back to the train station. There is also the death of a badly beaten dog who might or might not have found peace in the grounds of the monastery; and a rabid fox the glowers in the bushes and eventually dies. Oh and there are 13 goldfish nailed through the eyes to a board. No idea what that was about.
None of this really captures the book. It's beautifully written/translated. Krasznahorkai sentences are long and poetic and draw you in as he describes in loving detail each facet of monastery and its construction. It's a beautiful meditation on art/culture/religion and how the external can be captured by the finite.
5-stars
This is a short novella, 130 pages, 49 chapters.
It's hard to review this book without doing violence to the work. On the surface it tells in short chapters and long sentences, about the visit of the grandson of Prince Genji—a person out of time—who is searching for the most beautiful garden in the World, which he has read exists in a forgotten part of a large Buddhist monastery. He slips his drunken retinue, enters the monastery, feels sick, walks past the garden he has been looking for, gets a glass of water, falls asleep in the library, wakes refreshed, is horrified to discover the very non-Buddhist abbot's quarters, and goes back to the train station. There is also the death of a badly beaten dog who might or might not have found peace in the grounds of the monastery; and a rabid fox the glowers in the bushes and eventually dies. Oh and there are 13 goldfish nailed through the eyes to a board. No idea what that was about.
None of this really captures the book. It's beautifully written/translated. Krasznahorkai sentences are long and poetic and draw you in as he describes in loving detail each facet of monastery and its construction. It's a beautiful meditation on art/culture/religion and how the external can be captured by the finite.
5-stars
March 6, 2024
Ruminative, introspective—a slow accretion of meditative layers, their density belied by the book's brevity. The overall effect crept up, the pressure building as I approached the final pages, where it broke, washed over me, and coursed away down the slopes of dried-out riverbeds. (3.5)
October 12, 2025
Empiezas a leer algo breve, del reciente premio Nobel László Krasznahorkai, y te encuentras como el nieto del príncipe Genji del libro, fuera del tiempo, cerrando las páginas (embelesado) de «Al Norte la montaña, al Sur el lago, al Oeste el camino, al Este el río» horas después.
Es curioso cómo en tan pocas páginas, la fluctuación de historias y temas nos llevan de un lugar a otro construyendo un todo que finalmente fluye. Uno se deja llevar por la arquitectura descrita, se hipnotiza con sus reflexiones sobre la realidad y acaba engatusado cuando László habla sobre el poder de los libros.
Es curioso cómo en tan pocas páginas, la fluctuación de historias y temas nos llevan de un lugar a otro construyendo un todo que finalmente fluye. Uno se deja llevar por la arquitectura descrita, se hipnotiza con sus reflexiones sobre la realidad y acaba engatusado cuando László habla sobre el poder de los libros.
January 6, 2024
@karlreadskafka offered the astute observation within this slim volume one will find “no obvious darkness and despair, but quiet moments of Kafka’s dictum ‘There is hope, just not for us’ in the face of the light”. I think that’s as good as any a place to start.
Relative to his major work - the apocalyptic Übernovel that runs sequentially through ‘Satantango’ to ‘Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming’ - ‘A Mountain the North…’ arrives as both smaller in scale and bright(er) in atmospheric register. Remember, this is an author who is best known for conducting an annihilating orchestra of moral and physical decay (don’t believe me? Check my YouTube channel for a 45 minute philippic on the subject). So it comes as an unexpected but welcome surprise to read a novel that’s so… at home with itself in its hermetic world, rather than gleefully watching it collapse into rack and ruin.
Broadly speaking, the story acts as a spiritual successor to his deeply meditative “Seiobo There Below’, following the wanderings of the son of Prince Genji (otherwise unnamed) as he searches a monastery in Kyoto for a legendary garden. The sensory trappings that occupy Krasznahorkai’s authorial eye line are the architecture, relics, scrolls, and antiquities that intrude themselves on the natural world atop which they’re built. There’s a gentleness and serenity to the narrator’s directionless search, and the story finds it’s melancholic centre when he realises that though the garden surely exists, it’s unwilling to present itself to him. “There is hope, just not for us”.
Spiralling both outward and inward simultaneously, covering only moments yet also generations, ‘A Mountain to the North’ is an answer in search of a question, much in the same way its narrator is in search of a home. I’m glad to have finished another work by the Hungarian master of letters, giving my shattered brain an opportunity to “rest, at once experience the enlivening of an ancient thought of
obscure content, and at once begin to see that there was only the whole, and no details.”
Thank you once again to @ndpublishing for a beautiful little ARC. Happy to have this join the ever growing stack o László K, constantly in battle with Pynchon and Vollmann for supremacy on my shelf.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CkvMtr1rI...
Relative to his major work - the apocalyptic Übernovel that runs sequentially through ‘Satantango’ to ‘Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming’ - ‘A Mountain the North…’ arrives as both smaller in scale and bright(er) in atmospheric register. Remember, this is an author who is best known for conducting an annihilating orchestra of moral and physical decay (don’t believe me? Check my YouTube channel for a 45 minute philippic on the subject). So it comes as an unexpected but welcome surprise to read a novel that’s so… at home with itself in its hermetic world, rather than gleefully watching it collapse into rack and ruin.
Broadly speaking, the story acts as a spiritual successor to his deeply meditative “Seiobo There Below’, following the wanderings of the son of Prince Genji (otherwise unnamed) as he searches a monastery in Kyoto for a legendary garden. The sensory trappings that occupy Krasznahorkai’s authorial eye line are the architecture, relics, scrolls, and antiquities that intrude themselves on the natural world atop which they’re built. There’s a gentleness and serenity to the narrator’s directionless search, and the story finds it’s melancholic centre when he realises that though the garden surely exists, it’s unwilling to present itself to him. “There is hope, just not for us”.
Spiralling both outward and inward simultaneously, covering only moments yet also generations, ‘A Mountain to the North’ is an answer in search of a question, much in the same way its narrator is in search of a home. I’m glad to have finished another work by the Hungarian master of letters, giving my shattered brain an opportunity to “rest, at once experience the enlivening of an ancient thought of
obscure content, and at once begin to see that there was only the whole, and no details.”
Thank you once again to @ndpublishing for a beautiful little ARC. Happy to have this join the ever growing stack o László K, constantly in battle with Pynchon and Vollmann for supremacy on my shelf.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CkvMtr1rI...
September 29, 2024
Buf, qué libro más especial.
El viaje de un hombre en busca de un jardín que vio en una ilustración de un libro que representa la perfección. Sabe que se encuentra en un templo pero no en cuál ni en qué parte del mismo, pero no puede vivir tranquilo sin encontrarlo.
Acompañamos a este hombre en su busca al templo de Kioto, al del pabellón de oro, en su camino de menos de un día de duración.
Es una narración increíblemente descriptiva, filosófica, atemporal, de frases larguísimas, de distintas formas de decir lo mismo, pero a su vez complementándolo.
Si tenéis algo de proximidad a la filosofía zen os sonarán temas como la vacuidad, la insignificancia de la existencia, la ambigüedad, la futilidad de la realidad, la contemplación espiritual…
Básicamente esta historia encierra una metáfora sobre estos fundamentos de la filosofía zen y es maravillosa. Para leer despacio, degustar, reflexionar y sacar mucho entrelíneas.
(5/5)⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ ¡maravilla!
El viaje de un hombre en busca de un jardín que vio en una ilustración de un libro que representa la perfección. Sabe que se encuentra en un templo pero no en cuál ni en qué parte del mismo, pero no puede vivir tranquilo sin encontrarlo.
Acompañamos a este hombre en su busca al templo de Kioto, al del pabellón de oro, en su camino de menos de un día de duración.
Es una narración increíblemente descriptiva, filosófica, atemporal, de frases larguísimas, de distintas formas de decir lo mismo, pero a su vez complementándolo.
Si tenéis algo de proximidad a la filosofía zen os sonarán temas como la vacuidad, la insignificancia de la existencia, la ambigüedad, la futilidad de la realidad, la contemplación espiritual…
Básicamente esta historia encierra una metáfora sobre estos fundamentos de la filosofía zen y es maravillosa. Para leer despacio, degustar, reflexionar y sacar mucho entrelíneas.
(5/5)⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ ¡maravilla!
January 14, 2019
Es un libro increíble, puede parecer raro porque no tiene una narración tradicional, pero sin duda la tiene, si uno toma en cuenta que el escritor también es guionista, y que es una narración zen, dónde todo es más contemplativo, la imposibilidad, el infinito y la sinrazón de todo. Es increíble, muy contemplativo, es posible disfrutar imágenes dulces, llenas de nada y un todo, además lleno de pequeños detalles e ideas geniales.
November 11, 2022
What an experience. From staggering mathematical contemplation to historical book making and the distribution of pollen to the animism of vending machines - my brain is spinning. Buddhist impermanence and lack of desire are the most prominent themes that a reader might call coherent.
First - there is no first - the book starts with chapter 2. This (dis)orients the reader - and I guess that might be my most consistent observation. There's always a keen sense of orientation and perspective in the work of Krasznahorkai - and that sense is most prominent throughout. For those that are familiar - you will notice recurring themes that peak here. Distance and space, repetition and occurrence are frequent meditations and like a band that does the rare thing of reaching new heights of a similar expression - Krasznahorkai has hit new heights. So this is more of a reaction than a review - and I'll admit I am at a lack of words. Rarely have I felt the author just force me to follow along in such a relative daze. In many ways - the whole book reminds me of the film Satantango - when a mist or fog suddenly arises with no explanation. The impact is powerful and while disorienting - it has the effect of drawing the viewers attention while at the same time prompting people to abandon what is currently known. Hauntingly beautiful - at times jarring and always profoundly interesting. Roll out the hyperbole - I can't think of a more powerful writer.
If you've been discouraged by his previous works that feature sentences that work like midnight road trips through Utah - you might be pleased to know that there's a plethora of punctuation to provide more structural clarity than Krasznahorkai offered his readers previously. Makes no difference to this reader - I was just as pleasantly bewildered as with previous Krasznahorkai reads.
First - there is no first - the book starts with chapter 2. This (dis)orients the reader - and I guess that might be my most consistent observation. There's always a keen sense of orientation and perspective in the work of Krasznahorkai - and that sense is most prominent throughout. For those that are familiar - you will notice recurring themes that peak here. Distance and space, repetition and occurrence are frequent meditations and like a band that does the rare thing of reaching new heights of a similar expression - Krasznahorkai has hit new heights. So this is more of a reaction than a review - and I'll admit I am at a lack of words. Rarely have I felt the author just force me to follow along in such a relative daze. In many ways - the whole book reminds me of the film Satantango - when a mist or fog suddenly arises with no explanation. The impact is powerful and while disorienting - it has the effect of drawing the viewers attention while at the same time prompting people to abandon what is currently known. Hauntingly beautiful - at times jarring and always profoundly interesting. Roll out the hyperbole - I can't think of a more powerful writer.
If you've been discouraged by his previous works that feature sentences that work like midnight road trips through Utah - you might be pleased to know that there's a plethora of punctuation to provide more structural clarity than Krasznahorkai offered his readers previously. Makes no difference to this reader - I was just as pleasantly bewildered as with previous Krasznahorkai reads.
February 5, 2018
Este libro encaja perfecto en la categoría “escritores occidentales enamorados de Japón” (les hablo a ustedes, Yourcenar, Nothomb y Elizondo). La novela de Krasznahorkai, húngaro, es un obsequio disfrazado de desafío: es una prueba para los lectores occidentales, quienes estamos acostumbrados a la acción, el héroe/antihéroe y su misión definida, el arco dramático, la catarsis. Aquí no hay nada de eso. Hay, en cambio, conceptos asociados con las culturas de Oriente y sus prácticas artísticas: paciencia, un cuidado artesanal del lenguaje, un avance lento pero rítmico. A este libro hay que entrarle con la convicción con la que se construyen los templos japoneses: todo tiene un sentido, aún si inicialmente está oculto, pues, como escribe el autor, “sólo existe el todo, no los detalles”.
March 21, 2023
This strangely calming work is part existential meditation and mystery, part exposition of the design and construction of Buddhist monasteries, geological and botanical visualization and much more. Central to this unusual, disjointed novel is the grandson of Prince Genji, a character out of time and place, who is seeking a garden whose existence has obsessed and eluded him for years. Unfolding over 50 chapters, most only 2-3 pages long, through quiet, often unbroken sentences that extend for a page or more, this is a book that is remarkably engaging and beautiful.
A longer review can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2023/03/20/th...
A longer review can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2023/03/20/th...
September 30, 2024
Escollino polo título tan suxestivo: co devir do texto souben que o autor húngaro estábase a referir aos principios protectores orientais da construción dun mosteiro, que por rito ou tradición converteríanse nos catro preceptos de localización de calquera edificio.
E logo estaba a figura do neto do mestre que buscaba a beleza, o mozo ultrasensible de mirada particular, outro trazo tradicional budista, como naquela película Primavera, verán, outono, inverno... e primavera -outro titulazo-, á que me lembra bastante esta obra.
E o camiño. O relato vai seleccionando en inquietantes capítulos e longas descricións o roteiro máis harmónico de chegar ao corazón dun mosteiro na busca do xardín mitificado: a ponte, o pórtico, o ginkgo, a campá, o buda... A intención desta estrutura é fomentar a meditación del lector?
Recoñezo que ao principio me cansaban as descricións espaciais: outro escritor occidental grandilocuente con frases como ouroboros coma Sebald. Seguro que ten que haber outra maneira de elaborar un discurso sobre unha contorna tan sublime, aínda que xa o autor recoñece as súas dificultades ao longo do texto. Pero entón cheguei a capítulos como o do ceo, o vento, a madeira, a pedra, o plan divino, o infinito, que alcanzan outro nivel, e reconcilieime.
E logo estaba a figura do neto do mestre que buscaba a beleza, o mozo ultrasensible de mirada particular, outro trazo tradicional budista, como naquela película Primavera, verán, outono, inverno... e primavera -outro titulazo-, á que me lembra bastante esta obra.
E o camiño. O relato vai seleccionando en inquietantes capítulos e longas descricións o roteiro máis harmónico de chegar ao corazón dun mosteiro na busca do xardín mitificado: a ponte, o pórtico, o ginkgo, a campá, o buda... A intención desta estrutura é fomentar a meditación del lector?
Recoñezo que ao principio me cansaban as descricións espaciais: outro escritor occidental grandilocuente con frases como ouroboros coma Sebald. Seguro que ten que haber outra maneira de elaborar un discurso sobre unha contorna tan sublime, aínda que xa o autor recoñece as súas dificultades ao longo do texto. Pero entón cheguei a capítulos como o do ceo, o vento, a madeira, a pedra, o plan divino, o infinito, que alcanzan outro nivel, e reconcilieime.
June 23, 2024
63rd book of 2024.
Sort of everything I like in a novel: experimental, thoughtful, obscure in a way that doesn't alienate, etc., but also falls of short of fully achieving all these things in a satisifying way. This novella is boring, beautiful, at times annoying, at other times peaceful as anything. It is genius that Krasznahorkai creates peacefulness and zen by writing long, rambling sentences about the architecture of temples and gardens and paths. The character of this novel (impossibly, the grandson of Prince Genji) is barely in it. A few short chapters are dedicated to him. (Only near the end do we discover what it's all about: he is looking for this perfect garden he once saw in a book.) The rest of the novel is comprised of longwinded sentences about measurements, temples and shrines*. Naturally, this can be boring, but when I reminded myself that Krasznahorkai was forcing me to slow down, read slowly, focus on things that I would otherwise not care about, he was actually creating mindfulness in me as the reader. Why tell me the novel is about peace when you can simply create peace? I suppose in some ways peacefulness is synonymous with boredom. As Arthur C. Clarke explored in Childhood's End, the problem with utopia, ultimately, is the fact it's boring. It isn't all peaceful though, there are rotting, beaten dead animals, and the idea of death lingers throughout everything else so by the end I wasn't sure exactly what I was feeling. It would certainly be an interesting novel to debate.
____________________________________
*For example, I opened to a random chapter (they're mostly only two pages long) and got XI, which opens:
And so on, in a chapter-sized paragraph. If that bored you to tears, that's most of the book.
Sort of everything I like in a novel: experimental, thoughtful, obscure in a way that doesn't alienate, etc., but also falls of short of fully achieving all these things in a satisifying way. This novella is boring, beautiful, at times annoying, at other times peaceful as anything. It is genius that Krasznahorkai creates peacefulness and zen by writing long, rambling sentences about the architecture of temples and gardens and paths. The character of this novel (impossibly, the grandson of Prince Genji) is barely in it. A few short chapters are dedicated to him. (Only near the end do we discover what it's all about: he is looking for this perfect garden he once saw in a book.) The rest of the novel is comprised of longwinded sentences about measurements, temples and shrines*. Naturally, this can be boring, but when I reminded myself that Krasznahorkai was forcing me to slow down, read slowly, focus on things that I would otherwise not care about, he was actually creating mindfulness in me as the reader. Why tell me the novel is about peace when you can simply create peace? I suppose in some ways peacefulness is synonymous with boredom. As Arthur C. Clarke explored in Childhood's End, the problem with utopia, ultimately, is the fact it's boring. It isn't all peaceful though, there are rotting, beaten dead animals, and the idea of death lingers throughout everything else so by the end I wasn't sure exactly what I was feeling. It would certainly be an interesting novel to debate.
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*For example, I opened to a random chapter (they're mostly only two pages long) and got XI, which opens:
Behind the gate construction, at a distance measured in ken of exactly ten multiplied by two, along the courtyard's central axis, accordingly placed along the central line extending from the first gate, the Nandaimon, a second gate, known as the Chumon, stood toward the courtyard's northern end, but still cast into its wide, vacant space; it was not a mirror image of the first, nor was it simply its displacement or a mere repetition, somewhat farther back, of that first gate, but it was much more an elevation, a redoubling of its weight, utilizing the admission, of his arrival in this space, was rendered a task, so that he who had once stepped across the high threshold of the earlier, first gate complex known as the Nandaimon now found a place of prayer, of deliverance, the disciplinary sign that from this point on, after the vile history of human existence, he would become the favoured subject of such questions in a place where questions having to do with human beings no longer arose [...]
And so on, in a chapter-sized paragraph. If that bored you to tears, that's most of the book.
October 4, 2016
A beautiful piece of art. One of the best books I have ever read. László Krasznahorkai has early captured Bélla Tarr’s attention. Both Hungarian artists worked together in several Tarr’s films after Krasznahorkai’s novels. Such collaboration includes cult films like Werkmeister Harmonies (2000), Damnation (1988), and Satan’s Tango (1985). Tarr is probably one of the best film directors of the world. Krasznahorkai is probably one of the best writers of the world. This book in particular is a novel about a perfect garden located in a miraculous monastery near Kyoto. It is also concerned with the old and the new Japan, the inner struggle between life and death, the openness of nature and the allegory of architecture. At a deeper level, but still explicit in each perception, this novel elaborates on the unthinkable relation between space, time, and the unbearable infinitude. The novel’s title gives coordinates for the location of the monastery. To find the magic garden inside that monastery is the impossible task of a possible journey. Words flow poetically in this novel. The style is complex, the subject is simple. Descriptions are anchored in abstractions that make sense only through vivid sensorial experiences. At the core of its own language, the place where the silence lives, this novel shares a mathematical paradox between discontinuity and infinity. Of course it is a novel rather than pure mathematics, but the formal intuition is still interesting. In sum, this book belongs in my opinion to the highest quality set in the universe of literature. A brand new embodied concept of experience might result from a thorough reading, just like Walter Benjamin proposed.
April 14, 2024
A little like a Zen koan crossed with a fairytale.
December 22, 2024
Una alegoria de la existencia humana, un hermoso jardín escondido, que el nieto del príncipe Ganji decide buscar a tientas, como impelido por una necesidad atávica.
Poco más de 100 paginas que parecen multiplicarse como los peces del milagro bíblico, se dice tanto en ellas, que si uno lo piensa no puede caber en un libro tan pequeño.
El caos y el azar de toda creación, siempre deviene en milagros. László Krasznahorkai toma una lupa y nos lo muestra con una belleza sobrecogedora que deja sin aliento. No quiero leer nada que me quite esta sensación en un buen tiempo.
Poco más de 100 paginas que parecen multiplicarse como los peces del milagro bíblico, se dice tanto en ellas, que si uno lo piensa no puede caber en un libro tan pequeño.
El caos y el azar de toda creación, siempre deviene en milagros. László Krasznahorkai toma una lupa y nos lo muestra con una belleza sobrecogedora que deja sin aliento. No quiero leer nada que me quite esta sensación en un buen tiempo.
January 21, 2025
A short story stretched out to a novella through repeated phrases and empty pages: some interesting digressions on scientific, mathematical and technical themes - not done as well as Thomas Pynchon; an anti-plot, carefully stripped of coincidences, and a dead dog; I cared about the dog.
June 18, 2023
...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]
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