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Animalinside
As if some chained being had to shake its essence free, as if art taken to its limit were a form of howling, Animalinside explodes from its first line: "He wants to break free, attempts to stretch open the walls, but he has been tautened by them, and there he remains in this tautening, in this constraint, and there is nothing to do but howl. . . ." To create this work that strains against all constraints, László Krasznahorkai began from one of Max Neumann’s paintings; Neumann, spurred into action, created 14 more images, which unleashed an additional 13 texts from the author. Animalinside is the rare case of two matchless artists meeting across disciplines, and New Directions is very proud to publish a limited edition of this powerful novella, exquisitely produced by Sylph Editions and the Cahiers Series of the American University of Paris with a deluxe seven-stage printing process for the amazing Neumann images.
48 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2010
5 people are currently reading
1131 people want to read
About the author
László Krasznahorkai
41 books2,936 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 67 reviews
October 19, 2025
'There is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.''
-Samuel Beckett
Laszlo Krasznahorkai, the name stirs up a thrilling sensation through your spine as if you are about to embark on the sojourn of reciting a poetry, the music of rhyming sounds, conjures up as you read the name, fuels your literary buds with aplomb, of course with an awareness of ominous melancholy which the author is known for. As you pick up the book, you enter the world of mammoth proportions wherein the prose plunges you in a universe of infinite possibilities, ironic and contradictory at times; the prose may pierce your heart with its sharp exactness since it acts as a complex vehicle for the author to concoct a surrealistic real world- perhaps a dark painting with brushes of life infused in it. Krasznahorkai has always been fascinated with the prospect that literature can be used to enact reality rather than it’s being reflected or conveyed by the prose. His passionate obsession with absurdly long sentences is attributed to his desire to weave up sentences humane in nature for conjuring up the dance of life through them.
source
Animalinside starts with a penetrating revelation, as you expect from the author, that a thing or an animal, perhaps, tries to break free the shackles and open the walls but he has been tautened by them and he howls. He howls endlessly and uninterruptedly as if his howling and his tautening define his entire existence, anything or everything he was, no more, everything that he could shall never be as if he his entire existence has been caged in the temporal and spatial moment so that his being does not exist beside this very space and moment. And he howls in cognizance of this unbelievable horror which strikes him upon the realization that he has been excluded from the existence, so what that is speaking now is an apparition of his existence, as if he has been caged in the scorching hell of nothingness from which there are no ways and means available to him to break free. The creature or thing is expelled from time, stuck in space, howls in despair out of his pain of being ‘non-being’ in this flux of being and nothingness.
The narrator of Animalinside portrays the pain and suffering of the creature through deft, compassionate but untamed pen of the omnipotent author, and the reader feels as if his sympathy is just about to pour out. However, the creature frees itself from the clutches of the narrator and springs itself up from the dungeons of obliviousness to see right into the eyes of the reader, a horror creeps in to send shivers across the soul of the reader since the creature is formless and featureless but of out of the world proportions. We see the echo of voices from perspectives of the narrator and the creature, the creature at itself able to express himself through the words of the author, his restricted existence opens up boundless possibilities to ponder upon for the reader. The creature comes across as a timeless, memoryless non-being which can’t be touched, felt or seen in the pictures ever produced in the world. What sort of beast he is, is he from some fantastic world, like labyrinths of Schultz or Marquez, the beast could extend the entire universe or the cosmos itself for he is bigger than anything that is finite, it is strong enough to all barriers of the cosmos and thereby be one with the nothingness.
source
Who is he, the beast or rather what is he? Is he a suspended existence of some galactic being who has been trapped in time and space, for the time being, the reader feels, it is nothing. We see a human like being interacts with the beast so as the reader feels a sense of comfort on evading the beast for the time being. However, the reader is again taken aback by sudden attack of the beast on the consciousness of the reader and launches itself in all dimensions and times for annihilation, we see that there are more than one beast or perhaps more than versions of the same, probably representing the ruins of the cosmos. The beast reveals that it resides inside the human like being he calls ‘you’ and is being carried by him and he is its master, we see that the human like beings also multiply there perhaps to represent the entire humanity.
source
The question unanswered, what is it, the beast, is he consciousness of the universe, of this entire cosmos which is inside and contains all our virtues and evils, everything we are being made up of, out entire being, the being of entire humanity. The wrestle between the entity and the humanity goes on till the very end of book or the end of universe itself, the question that who would win eventually becomes futile since it's just the annihilation and ruins in the end. The thing is unremittingly repeating itself, perhaps over years or millennials, there is no birth no end -nihilo ex nihilo. However, it inevitably digresses me towards the idea of infiniteness and the recurring nature of the universe itself, for it may represent all voices, all the pictures, all the paintings, perhaps all beings (non-beings) or one or different versions of oneself repeating itself infinitely through space and time.
Animalinside may be slim in its capacity and magnitude but not in its impact as the influence it may create upon the readers in of monstrous proportions. The prose of Krasznahorkai is as demanding as it can be since it challenges the reader to engage him/ herself for actively push the narrative forward with its character and the narrator. The author is known for pushing the very limits of language to concoct an atmosphere which may adroitly enact the human existence through the apocalyptic times and settings. The artist- Max Neumann and the author comes together to conjure up a book so unique that both artists complement each other in way that the paintings of Neumann may seem to underline what has been written by Krasznahorkai and vice-versa. Krasznahorkai constructs lengthy sentences out of short phrases interlaced through commas made from piercing and engraving words. The author uses repetitions like Thomas Bernhard to create the menacing impact of the entity through lyrical symmetry the prose is infused with. One could actually feel the panting of one’s heart when reading the vibrating, pulsating, and trembling text. The authors such as Laszlo Krasznahorkai have the vehemence and adroitness to do as they want, since they are the omnipotent beings of their oeuvre- wherein all rules, norms watch themselves to be annihilated into nothingness. The author writes to push the literature to its most extreme limits so that it comes closer to resemble our life.
source
-Samuel Beckett
Laszlo Krasznahorkai, the name stirs up a thrilling sensation through your spine as if you are about to embark on the sojourn of reciting a poetry, the music of rhyming sounds, conjures up as you read the name, fuels your literary buds with aplomb, of course with an awareness of ominous melancholy which the author is known for. As you pick up the book, you enter the world of mammoth proportions wherein the prose plunges you in a universe of infinite possibilities, ironic and contradictory at times; the prose may pierce your heart with its sharp exactness since it acts as a complex vehicle for the author to concoct a surrealistic real world- perhaps a dark painting with brushes of life infused in it. Krasznahorkai has always been fascinated with the prospect that literature can be used to enact reality rather than it’s being reflected or conveyed by the prose. His passionate obsession with absurdly long sentences is attributed to his desire to weave up sentences humane in nature for conjuring up the dance of life through them.
source
Animalinside starts with a penetrating revelation, as you expect from the author, that a thing or an animal, perhaps, tries to break free the shackles and open the walls but he has been tautened by them and he howls. He howls endlessly and uninterruptedly as if his howling and his tautening define his entire existence, anything or everything he was, no more, everything that he could shall never be as if he his entire existence has been caged in the temporal and spatial moment so that his being does not exist beside this very space and moment. And he howls in cognizance of this unbelievable horror which strikes him upon the realization that he has been excluded from the existence, so what that is speaking now is an apparition of his existence, as if he has been caged in the scorching hell of nothingness from which there are no ways and means available to him to break free. The creature or thing is expelled from time, stuck in space, howls in despair out of his pain of being ‘non-being’ in this flux of being and nothingness.
The narrator of Animalinside portrays the pain and suffering of the creature through deft, compassionate but untamed pen of the omnipotent author, and the reader feels as if his sympathy is just about to pour out. However, the creature frees itself from the clutches of the narrator and springs itself up from the dungeons of obliviousness to see right into the eyes of the reader, a horror creeps in to send shivers across the soul of the reader since the creature is formless and featureless but of out of the world proportions. We see the echo of voices from perspectives of the narrator and the creature, the creature at itself able to express himself through the words of the author, his restricted existence opens up boundless possibilities to ponder upon for the reader. The creature comes across as a timeless, memoryless non-being which can’t be touched, felt or seen in the pictures ever produced in the world. What sort of beast he is, is he from some fantastic world, like labyrinths of Schultz or Marquez, the beast could extend the entire universe or the cosmos itself for he is bigger than anything that is finite, it is strong enough to all barriers of the cosmos and thereby be one with the nothingness.
source
Who is he, the beast or rather what is he? Is he a suspended existence of some galactic being who has been trapped in time and space, for the time being, the reader feels, it is nothing. We see a human like being interacts with the beast so as the reader feels a sense of comfort on evading the beast for the time being. However, the reader is again taken aback by sudden attack of the beast on the consciousness of the reader and launches itself in all dimensions and times for annihilation, we see that there are more than one beast or perhaps more than versions of the same, probably representing the ruins of the cosmos. The beast reveals that it resides inside the human like being he calls ‘you’ and is being carried by him and he is its master, we see that the human like beings also multiply there perhaps to represent the entire humanity.
source
The question unanswered, what is it, the beast, is he consciousness of the universe, of this entire cosmos which is inside and contains all our virtues and evils, everything we are being made up of, out entire being, the being of entire humanity. The wrestle between the entity and the humanity goes on till the very end of book or the end of universe itself, the question that who would win eventually becomes futile since it's just the annihilation and ruins in the end. The thing is unremittingly repeating itself, perhaps over years or millennials, there is no birth no end -nihilo ex nihilo. However, it inevitably digresses me towards the idea of infiniteness and the recurring nature of the universe itself, for it may represent all voices, all the pictures, all the paintings, perhaps all beings (non-beings) or one or different versions of oneself repeating itself infinitely through space and time.
Animalinside may be slim in its capacity and magnitude but not in its impact as the influence it may create upon the readers in of monstrous proportions. The prose of Krasznahorkai is as demanding as it can be since it challenges the reader to engage him/ herself for actively push the narrative forward with its character and the narrator. The author is known for pushing the very limits of language to concoct an atmosphere which may adroitly enact the human existence through the apocalyptic times and settings. The artist- Max Neumann and the author comes together to conjure up a book so unique that both artists complement each other in way that the paintings of Neumann may seem to underline what has been written by Krasznahorkai and vice-versa. Krasznahorkai constructs lengthy sentences out of short phrases interlaced through commas made from piercing and engraving words. The author uses repetitions like Thomas Bernhard to create the menacing impact of the entity through lyrical symmetry the prose is infused with. One could actually feel the panting of one’s heart when reading the vibrating, pulsating, and trembling text. The authors such as Laszlo Krasznahorkai have the vehemence and adroitness to do as they want, since they are the omnipotent beings of their oeuvre- wherein all rules, norms watch themselves to be annihilated into nothingness. The author writes to push the literature to its most extreme limits so that it comes closer to resemble our life.
source
October 9, 2025
Now Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2025
Created in collaboration with painter Max Neumann (who hails from my home town), Krasznahorkai's menacing tale pulls off a disturbing stunt: The narrative voice is the force of destruction that resides in all of us, "the spirit that denies", as Goethe would put it, and instead of a plot, the whole text is a kind of self-explanation that manages to explain nothing, but evokes primal terror, a fear of oneself, of the inner power that lures us to our own demise. In a way, the text is a meditation on the nature of that force, what exactly it is and how it fights us, trying to convince us that we're its master while plotting to annihilate the whole earth.
It took me some pages to get into this small masterpiece, but then I discovered its mesmerizing genius.
Created in collaboration with painter Max Neumann (who hails from my home town), Krasznahorkai's menacing tale pulls off a disturbing stunt: The narrative voice is the force of destruction that resides in all of us, "the spirit that denies", as Goethe would put it, and instead of a plot, the whole text is a kind of self-explanation that manages to explain nothing, but evokes primal terror, a fear of oneself, of the inner power that lures us to our own demise. In a way, the text is a meditation on the nature of that force, what exactly it is and how it fights us, trying to convince us that we're its master while plotting to annihilate the whole earth.
It took me some pages to get into this small masterpiece, but then I discovered its mesmerizing genius.
June 20, 2011
First, this book smells great. I don't know if it's the ink used in the beautiful and textured illustrations or one of the three types of paper used but something smells wonderful. I don't usually go around sniffing books (ok, sometimes I sniff the books I'm reading, there are some very nice smelling books out there from fancy smells like this book has to comforting dusty and moldering smells in old books), but the smells of this book jump right out when you open up the pages. In my hopes to be ignored at work and left to do my job with no further expectations (because I have no further expectations from the company so I'm looking to set up a relationship based on mutual expectations, maybe if I'm offered even the possibility of a cost of living raise in the future I'll reconsider my attitude) I only present books to our daily 'show and tell' sessions with inane comments like this book smells good. That is how I presented this book after I gave some mumbled praise for the author's two earlier works that have been translated into English. Since I'm not paid to read on the job I think observations of the olfactory qualities of books are perfectly acceptable.
I'm sure you, the goodreads.com'ers, want something more from me than the observation that this book smells good. Well, guess what? The book reads good, too. Oh, and it's a stunning to look at. This is a great example of a reading experience that couldn't be captured on one of those infernal electronic reading devices. Everything about the book's physicality is superb. The paper. The font. The illustrations. Fuck you e-readers, I don't want six choices of a font, I want someone skilled at coming up with a font that is perfect for a text to come up with one. I want someone to make the artistic decision to the size of the text. I want well layed out pages, not the hodge-podge bullshit mess of just words on a screen that I can change at will to fulfill a homogeneity to every book I read. Oh and fuck you to anyone who tells me 'get on board' with this stupid trend and even ever getting a raise at work isn't going to change my position on e-readers.
But, this review shouldn't be a rant against those awful machines that are only good for reading throw-away books, this is a review about a really beautiful book that has within it's pages a dark and apocalyptic 'story'. Ok, not a story, more of a series of monologues from the darkness that lives inside each and everyone of us. The animal side, the destructive impulse, the part that gets in the way of every humanist ideal and that has made a mockery of every -ism that has promised some unredeemable utopian check.
If I got the introduction right (which I skimmed really fast, I don't know why I got bored with those two pages, but I didn't go back to read it, and I've already put the book in 'safe' keeping on a shelf, and I'm so lazy to get up and look to make sure I'm correct), the first chapter of the book (each chapter is only at most a couple of pages) was Krasznahorkai writing based on a Max Neumann drawing. The picture shows a dog, like on the cover of the book, trapped in a space. The subsequent chapters the author wrote and then they were illustrated by the artist, so the end result is a collaboration with each person using the other's work as inspiration. The words and art co-mingle very nicely together, they each add something to the other. It's not a case of the book being illustrated to show off narrative points, and the illustrations don't feel redundant or unrelated (but forced to fit into the 'work'), rather both the words and the pictures each help to open each other up, they add dimensions to each other, they help give each other 'meaning' (whatever that 'means').
I wanted to find the books first illustration online so I could share a good quality picture of it (rather than take a picture of my own of it, which wouldn't look very good), but I couldn't find it, so instead this is from later on the in book, which is a picture that Neumann would have done in response to Krasznahorkai's words.
Nice isn't it? Now imagine it smelling great and having a great texture. You know you want to track down a copy of this beautiful and bleak short piece of literature. And you better do so quickly because there are only 2000 of these being printed and well it will be a nice book to own.
I'm sure you, the goodreads.com'ers, want something more from me than the observation that this book smells good. Well, guess what? The book reads good, too. Oh, and it's a stunning to look at. This is a great example of a reading experience that couldn't be captured on one of those infernal electronic reading devices. Everything about the book's physicality is superb. The paper. The font. The illustrations. Fuck you e-readers, I don't want six choices of a font, I want someone skilled at coming up with a font that is perfect for a text to come up with one. I want someone to make the artistic decision to the size of the text. I want well layed out pages, not the hodge-podge bullshit mess of just words on a screen that I can change at will to fulfill a homogeneity to every book I read. Oh and fuck you to anyone who tells me 'get on board' with this stupid trend and even ever getting a raise at work isn't going to change my position on e-readers.
But, this review shouldn't be a rant against those awful machines that are only good for reading throw-away books, this is a review about a really beautiful book that has within it's pages a dark and apocalyptic 'story'. Ok, not a story, more of a series of monologues from the darkness that lives inside each and everyone of us. The animal side, the destructive impulse, the part that gets in the way of every humanist ideal and that has made a mockery of every -ism that has promised some unredeemable utopian check.
If I got the introduction right (which I skimmed really fast, I don't know why I got bored with those two pages, but I didn't go back to read it, and I've already put the book in 'safe' keeping on a shelf, and I'm so lazy to get up and look to make sure I'm correct), the first chapter of the book (each chapter is only at most a couple of pages) was Krasznahorkai writing based on a Max Neumann drawing. The picture shows a dog, like on the cover of the book, trapped in a space. The subsequent chapters the author wrote and then they were illustrated by the artist, so the end result is a collaboration with each person using the other's work as inspiration. The words and art co-mingle very nicely together, they each add something to the other. It's not a case of the book being illustrated to show off narrative points, and the illustrations don't feel redundant or unrelated (but forced to fit into the 'work'), rather both the words and the pictures each help to open each other up, they add dimensions to each other, they help give each other 'meaning' (whatever that 'means').
I wanted to find the books first illustration online so I could share a good quality picture of it (rather than take a picture of my own of it, which wouldn't look very good), but I couldn't find it, so instead this is from later on the in book, which is a picture that Neumann would have done in response to Krasznahorkai's words.
Nice isn't it? Now imagine it smelling great and having a great texture. You know you want to track down a copy of this beautiful and bleak short piece of literature. And you better do so quickly because there are only 2000 of these being printed and well it will be a nice book to own.
January 8, 2025
Hypnotic, yes. In the end a bit more terrifying than I was expecting, but that only points to my stupidity, because I should have been expecting it in the first place, seeing as it is Krasznahorkai. For me, it’s a parable. Of certain people, certain institutions, and certain ideologies.
February 18, 2021
جایگاه “کراسناهورکایی” در ادبیات کاملا مشخصه؛ چه به واسطه ی فیلم هایی که کارگردان مهمی مثل “بلاتار” از روی نوشته هاش ساخته (مثل تانگوی شیطان)، و چه به واسطه ی جوایز ادبی متعددی که دریافت کرده. اما حتی اگه سراغی هم از دو مورد ذکر شده نگیرید، در این کتاب طی ۴۴ صفحه ی ناقابل متوجه ی قلم فوق العاده پرنفوذ نویسنده میشید.
از صفحات اولیه کتاب، حس شک، گیج شدن و اضطراب ناشی از مواجهه با موجودی ناشناخته به من منتقل شد. مدام از خودم میپرسیدم که راجع به چی صحبت میکنه و هرجا که فکر میکردم حدسم درسته و دست نویسنده برای من رو شده، دقیقا همونجا، نویسنده جواب من رو رد میکرد و من رو مجبور میکرد که تا انتها همراهیش کنم.
قسمت جالب توجه داستان این بود که این موجود در عین ناشناخته بودن، گاهی اوقات به شدت برای من ملموس بود و حتی در بعضی مواقع درکش میکردم!
پس داستانی که بتونه همزمان احساس ترس، شک، کلافگی، غم و ... رو به من منتقل کنه، قطعا برای من قابل ستایشه.
از صفحات اولیه کتاب، حس شک، گیج شدن و اضطراب ناشی از مواجهه با موجودی ناشناخته به من منتقل شد. مدام از خودم میپرسیدم که راجع به چی صحبت میکنه و هرجا که فکر میکردم حدسم درسته و دست نویسنده برای من رو شده، دقیقا همونجا، نویسنده جواب من رو رد میکرد و من رو مجبور میکرد که تا انتها همراهیش کنم.
قسمت جالب توجه داستان این بود که این موجود در عین ناشناخته بودن، گاهی اوقات به شدت برای من ملموس بود و حتی در بعضی مواقع درکش میکردم!
پس داستانی که بتونه همزمان احساس ترس، شک، کلافگی، غم و ... رو به من منتقل کنه، قطعا برای من قابل ستایشه.
November 17, 2010
The whole Cahiers Series is brilliant and beautiful (see http://tinyurl.com/23veqas for more info), but this is something beyond . . .
ANIMALINSIDE is really a two-author, two-medium work. It's made up of 14 short pieces by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, all written in response to paintings by Max Neumann. (To clarify, Krasznahorkai wrote the first piece after the first artwork, and his text inspired Neumann's other pieces.)
And the text itself! Holy. Shit. That's really all I can say. I really liked Krasznahorkai's THE MELANCHOLY OF RESISTANCE (and look forward to reading WAR & WAR when there's time and peace), but this is something else. Reading this is being the presence of a master. Of a Beckett or a Kafka or a Joyce or a whomever floats your literary boat. What's undeniable is that this is something special that manages to be universal and mysterious, pointed and metaphorical all at once.
I'm prone to hyperbole (as Ed Nawotka likes to remind me when editing my articles), so I want to include a snippet . . . although even that's a bit tricky, since most of these 14 pieces are each one long, meandering, subclause upon subclause, emotive gathering sentence each. (Or maybe a couple sentences.) But whatever. Here's a bit that will give you a sense of the rhythm, the power of this:
"Shut tight your gates, and plug up the cracks, put up the beams and bring out the barbed wire, and protect yourselves from all sides, but know that you lock up in vain, you plug in vain, you raise beams in vain and wrap wire in vain, for that chink, that groove, that crevice which would be an obstacle for me does not exist; but it is just for that reason that you should barricade your gates and board up your windows, brick up your chimneys and protect yourselves, because I will break out, and I will arrive, and of course lock up your children well, and of course arm yourselves with many weapons, and organize your defense, and station the security guards, pull up the cordon and put the land-mines in place, just go ahead and do it, just get ready"
As so on for another 30 lines or so . . . Each section is hypnotic, and taken as a whole, it's pretty damn powerful.
Anyway, I'm 100% sure all my most bookish, Euro-centric friends will LOVE this little thing, which is so gorgeous that it's not just a book, but a true piece of art. And kudos to New Directions for distributing this Stateside. Ass and kicking. I can't recommend this enough.
ANIMALINSIDE is really a two-author, two-medium work. It's made up of 14 short pieces by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, all written in response to paintings by Max Neumann. (To clarify, Krasznahorkai wrote the first piece after the first artwork, and his text inspired Neumann's other pieces.)
And the text itself! Holy. Shit. That's really all I can say. I really liked Krasznahorkai's THE MELANCHOLY OF RESISTANCE (and look forward to reading WAR & WAR when there's time and peace), but this is something else. Reading this is being the presence of a master. Of a Beckett or a Kafka or a Joyce or a whomever floats your literary boat. What's undeniable is that this is something special that manages to be universal and mysterious, pointed and metaphorical all at once.
I'm prone to hyperbole (as Ed Nawotka likes to remind me when editing my articles), so I want to include a snippet . . . although even that's a bit tricky, since most of these 14 pieces are each one long, meandering, subclause upon subclause, emotive gathering sentence each. (Or maybe a couple sentences.) But whatever. Here's a bit that will give you a sense of the rhythm, the power of this:
"Shut tight your gates, and plug up the cracks, put up the beams and bring out the barbed wire, and protect yourselves from all sides, but know that you lock up in vain, you plug in vain, you raise beams in vain and wrap wire in vain, for that chink, that groove, that crevice which would be an obstacle for me does not exist; but it is just for that reason that you should barricade your gates and board up your windows, brick up your chimneys and protect yourselves, because I will break out, and I will arrive, and of course lock up your children well, and of course arm yourselves with many weapons, and organize your defense, and station the security guards, pull up the cordon and put the land-mines in place, just go ahead and do it, just get ready"
As so on for another 30 lines or so . . . Each section is hypnotic, and taken as a whole, it's pretty damn powerful.
Anyway, I'm 100% sure all my most bookish, Euro-centric friends will LOVE this little thing, which is so gorgeous that it's not just a book, but a true piece of art. And kudos to New Directions for distributing this Stateside. Ass and kicking. I can't recommend this enough.
June 11, 2014
http://msarki.tumblr.com/post/8846499...
You know I generally love this guy Krasznahorkai. But this book, not so hot. It was OK, but still, I was disappointed. I'll tell you why. There are collaborations, and then some. Often they work, and often they do not. I am a large fan of László Krasznahorkai and his work with film maker Béla Tarr. I enjoyed his last novel War & War. This latest book, a collaborative effort, Animalinside, looks interesting enough, has a theme I enjoy visiting, but I feel the work is just more of the same death-drive literature that Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, and others have already done to perfection. A little pretentious actually. I almost wish he wouldn't have made it. Max Neumann, the artist collaborator, meant nothing to me before reading this book and he means even less to me since owning some of his work on the pages of the book I just so happened to purchase. I know about animals, I know where we come from. I am not a "creationist". It is a beastly world we live in and then we die. The mystery is in the details of a life, not in the ending of it. The ending is nothing. Nothing is nothing. You get my drift?
You know I generally love this guy Krasznahorkai. But this book, not so hot. It was OK, but still, I was disappointed. I'll tell you why. There are collaborations, and then some. Often they work, and often they do not. I am a large fan of László Krasznahorkai and his work with film maker Béla Tarr. I enjoyed his last novel War & War. This latest book, a collaborative effort, Animalinside, looks interesting enough, has a theme I enjoy visiting, but I feel the work is just more of the same death-drive literature that Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, and others have already done to perfection. A little pretentious actually. I almost wish he wouldn't have made it. Max Neumann, the artist collaborator, meant nothing to me before reading this book and he means even less to me since owning some of his work on the pages of the book I just so happened to purchase. I know about animals, I know where we come from. I am not a "creationist". It is a beastly world we live in and then we die. The mystery is in the details of a life, not in the ending of it. The ending is nothing. Nothing is nothing. You get my drift?
February 19, 2021
نه که بخوام تعریف و تبلیغ ترجمهی خودم رو بکنم، اما کتاب جمع و جور و مناسبیه برای ورود به دنیای کراسناهورکای.
November 15, 2021
دنبال بخش مورد علاقهام از کتاب میگشتم که اینجا بنویسمش؛ دیدم با این حساب باید تقریبا کل کتاب را بنویسم. کراسناهورکای تاریخ انقضا ندارد؛ این مورد در آینده ثابت خواهد شد
November 12, 2014
Really? Colm Toibin wrote the introduction? Okay then. You'll be glad to know that, according to the introduction, Laszlo writes sentences. I think that's the take-away. (No stars)
More importantly, this is certainly the only book I will ever read that left me wondering whether the speaker was between one and all of: THE VOID, a kind of evil Krishna, a psychotic, a teenage boy trapped in the suburbs and really wanting to break free, a large dinosaur, DEEEEEAAAAATH, or my own pet dog when she's hungry. What starts off--as another reviewer has said--as a kind of dullish, less entertaining Bernhard tale somehow ends up with the speaker demanding to be fed, and suddenly all the early "I WILL COME AND THERE WILL BE NOTHING LEFT OF YOUR PUNY EXISTENCE" stuff starts to sound more like that crying whine that dogs do when they want to remind you they're there and would you please put the book down because feeding time is in only fifteen minutes I mean how will you get ready in time???????
The question becomes, is this intentional? Laszlo is often described as a kind of nihilist. If that's true, this book is unintentionally funny. If, however, he has nihilistic leanings and is aware of that fact, is willing to make fun of those leanings, and maybe suggest that there's more to life than those leanings, then he and his books immediately become more interesting. I'm feeling generous, so I'll take this line of interpretation. (two stars)
Also, it's a lovely little object. The art slightly overwhelms the story, I thought, but the story is plainly minor stuff anyway. The production values are astonishing--if only New Directions put this much effort into their other books, I wouldn't have to pick pages of (e.g.) Gottfried Benn up off the floor every time there was a stiff breeze past my bookcases. (two stars).
More importantly, this is certainly the only book I will ever read that left me wondering whether the speaker was between one and all of: THE VOID, a kind of evil Krishna, a psychotic, a teenage boy trapped in the suburbs and really wanting to break free, a large dinosaur, DEEEEEAAAAATH, or my own pet dog when she's hungry. What starts off--as another reviewer has said--as a kind of dullish, less entertaining Bernhard tale somehow ends up with the speaker demanding to be fed, and suddenly all the early "I WILL COME AND THERE WILL BE NOTHING LEFT OF YOUR PUNY EXISTENCE" stuff starts to sound more like that crying whine that dogs do when they want to remind you they're there and would you please put the book down because feeding time is in only fifteen minutes I mean how will you get ready in time???????
The question becomes, is this intentional? Laszlo is often described as a kind of nihilist. If that's true, this book is unintentionally funny. If, however, he has nihilistic leanings and is aware of that fact, is willing to make fun of those leanings, and maybe suggest that there's more to life than those leanings, then he and his books immediately become more interesting. I'm feeling generous, so I'll take this line of interpretation. (two stars)
Also, it's a lovely little object. The art slightly overwhelms the story, I thought, but the story is plainly minor stuff anyway. The production values are astonishing--if only New Directions put this much effort into their other books, I wouldn't have to pick pages of (e.g.) Gottfried Benn up off the floor every time there was a stiff breeze past my bookcases. (two stars).
read-in-2010
December 20, 2010Vehement canine variations, all driven to pure stark absolutes. Each entry in this slim volume was inspired by a collage by Max Neumann and is essentially a single winding sentence exploring a single claustrophobic concept of vengeance, restraint, or destruction. Krasnahorkai is better known as a novelist, but his precise prose serves well here as a kind of exacting poetry.
October 14, 2025
اولین تجربهی من از دنیای کراسناهورکایی بود.
تجربه عجیبی بود. میخوام توضیح بدما ولی نمیدونم چجوری توضیح بدم. انگار خودتون باید بخونید تا بفهمین منظورم چی بود.
تجربه عجیبی بود. میخوام توضیح بدما ولی نمیدونم چجوری توضیح بدم. انگار خودتون باید بخونید تا بفهمین منظورم چی بود.
October 10, 2025
Now worthy winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2025
A Black Hole from the Inside
This small book is a concentrated monologue of the thing (entity?) that persecutes and fuels the obsessions of all the other characters of Krasznahorkai. In an animal’s voice, it narrates the deadly play between the there-is and the there-is-not, or rather, its own side of it, which is the in-side, as it claims it penetrates everything. Its primary manifestation, or desire, is howling and it must confess that howling is not the same as being. It perceives it is locked out of or rather locked inside existence, which is putting pressure on it. Being suffocates non-being and there is nothing more frightening than the black howl of this non-being.
A possibility of distance, room for breathing, appears only in the first of these accounts. But even there, the third-person narration that presents us the feral entity zooms in on it and gets lost inside it, as the creature takes over in first person. Whatever relief we might feel at the end of this first section when the third-person perspective returns is lost in the remaining sections, to the bone-chilling and aggressive first-person voice. It is not an introspective soliloquy, but a provocative address, with large portions in second person, holding you, the reader, in its grip.
It would be too easy to call this entity the threatening existence. The constant tension the text oozes brings to mind Marilynne Robinson’s unforgettable line: By some bleak alchemy what had been mere unbeing becomes death when life is mingled with it. Krasznahorkai’s feral narrator is the voice of that death, unbeing no longer an option. Existence is perceived as a cage, one’s being is one’s cage (an idea Krasznahorkai reiterates in interviews), and this creature’s skin is its cage, as well. This creature occupies all space, it is the very opposite of the Kabbalist tzimtzum, the contraction that makes room for creation.
A lot of negation is used in the text. Hungarian has a distinct verb for “there is not” (nincs, which requires no auxiliary), but the English is eerily more accurate here in its inability to signify nothingness as an action. Evil is negation, it has no distinctive substance of its own.
No portrayal of evil can be more accurate than this. The animalistic voice is not a coolly distant dominator. It is the locus of utmost loneliness and doubt, a disgusting little dragon wagging its tail demanding food, “virgins from Athens”; a false personality that admits its space is a “false space”. Its suffering lies in that it is torn between the urge of expansion and its aversion to infinity. It is this what Lévinas’s Totality – self-sufficiency incapable of embracing otherness – would sound like if it had a voice.
When the black creature in Neumann’s images and Krasznahorkai’s response texts multiplies, it is clear this is no sign of its willingness to accept other beings. Soon enough, the four black figures dwindle to three. After completing their destruction of the world, two remain, to decide which one of them shall be king of nothingness. Evil consumes itself.
A Black Hole from the Inside
This small book is a concentrated monologue of the thing (entity?) that persecutes and fuels the obsessions of all the other characters of Krasznahorkai. In an animal’s voice, it narrates the deadly play between the there-is and the there-is-not, or rather, its own side of it, which is the in-side, as it claims it penetrates everything. Its primary manifestation, or desire, is howling and it must confess that howling is not the same as being. It perceives it is locked out of or rather locked inside existence, which is putting pressure on it. Being suffocates non-being and there is nothing more frightening than the black howl of this non-being.
A possibility of distance, room for breathing, appears only in the first of these accounts. But even there, the third-person narration that presents us the feral entity zooms in on it and gets lost inside it, as the creature takes over in first person. Whatever relief we might feel at the end of this first section when the third-person perspective returns is lost in the remaining sections, to the bone-chilling and aggressive first-person voice. It is not an introspective soliloquy, but a provocative address, with large portions in second person, holding you, the reader, in its grip.
It would be too easy to call this entity the threatening existence. The constant tension the text oozes brings to mind Marilynne Robinson’s unforgettable line: By some bleak alchemy what had been mere unbeing becomes death when life is mingled with it. Krasznahorkai’s feral narrator is the voice of that death, unbeing no longer an option. Existence is perceived as a cage, one’s being is one’s cage (an idea Krasznahorkai reiterates in interviews), and this creature’s skin is its cage, as well. This creature occupies all space, it is the very opposite of the Kabbalist tzimtzum, the contraction that makes room for creation.
A lot of negation is used in the text. Hungarian has a distinct verb for “there is not” (nincs, which requires no auxiliary), but the English is eerily more accurate here in its inability to signify nothingness as an action. Evil is negation, it has no distinctive substance of its own.
No portrayal of evil can be more accurate than this. The animalistic voice is not a coolly distant dominator. It is the locus of utmost loneliness and doubt, a disgusting little dragon wagging its tail demanding food, “virgins from Athens”; a false personality that admits its space is a “false space”. Its suffering lies in that it is torn between the urge of expansion and its aversion to infinity. It is this what Lévinas’s Totality – self-sufficiency incapable of embracing otherness – would sound like if it had a voice.
When the black creature in Neumann’s images and Krasznahorkai’s response texts multiplies, it is clear this is no sign of its willingness to accept other beings. Soon enough, the four black figures dwindle to three. After completing their destruction of the world, two remain, to decide which one of them shall be king of nothingness. Evil consumes itself.
December 5, 2013
It is books like these that make me wish I had a power over words. If I could only convey to you, you who are reading this, what beauty and terror is contained within these scant pages I would know such joy that I have never known. But I can't. I can't even convince you that while reading of this beauty and terror, you are reading about yourself. Yourself and everyone. Ah. It's a damn shame. If there was one book I could convince any of you to read, it would be this one. If I could sway you the way so many reviews on this site have me, I would. I would. I wish I could.
November 13, 2021
This brilliant slim book is a true collaboration between artist Max Neumann and László Krasznahorkai; Krasznahorkai wrote in response to viewing an image Neumann created, the Neumann created more images inspired by Krasznahorkai’s words. The book includes over a dozen fantastic Neumann prints.
Here Krasznahorkai does not tell a story or create a character; he introduces us to abstract power and unfocused menace, the dark energy that animates destruction, violence, and hatred. Mercifully it is a short work. The writing is brilliant, but I pictured a dark, angry mass moving in and out of the text.
Krasznahorkai is unlike any other writer and I highly recommend this and anything else he has written.
Here Krasznahorkai does not tell a story or create a character; he introduces us to abstract power and unfocused menace, the dark energy that animates destruction, violence, and hatred. Mercifully it is a short work. The writing is brilliant, but I pictured a dark, angry mass moving in and out of the text.
Krasznahorkai is unlike any other writer and I highly recommend this and anything else he has written.
July 13, 2011
[For my own introduction to Krasznahorkai, see The Mythology of Laszlo Krasznahorkai.]
Animalinside is a formal experiment for Hungarian author Krasznahorkai. Krasznahorkai wrote a text to accompany a drawing by Max Neumann, and Neumann drew over a dozen more in response, and Krasznahorkai wrote a short text for each one. There's an obvious unity to it all: the pictures all feature the (usually) black silhouette of some sort of feral animal poised to jump, and the texts are all about some sort of beast or beasts, usually written in the first person singular or plural.
The beast is angry, but helpless. The beast rants about how he is beyond any constraint that can be put on him by thought or concept. He is unique and beyond comparison: "It is impossible to confuse me with anyone else." He is within you, caged in one picture, but he is struggling to break free. And so another of Krasznahorkai's conceptual contradictions emerges: the beast that is at once free beyond everything and yet trapped.
Is the beast railing at the infinite itself, the inadequacy of the concept of the infinite, or the representation of the infinite (as in this picture)? I'm not sure. This tension is the same one that occurred in Krasznahorkai's earlier From the North by Hill, from the South by Lake, from the West by Roads, from the East by River, which contained a book by a mad Frenchman ranting against Cantor's mathematical conception of infinity. Perhaps the idea is that the conception traps us while simultaneously facing us with its inadequacy, and this is unbearable because, as with the ideas of mortality and immortality, neither side is a conceivable solution.
Because the text is more rarefied and abstract than Kraznahorkai's other work, it seems to resemble Beckett at times. But Beckett never portrayed such a vicious antagonism. His personae always collapse into themselves. Even their assertions of antagonism are hopeful but futile gestures against solipsistic nightmares. That is not the case in Krasznahorkai. I do not think it ever is. His characters and voices are always struggling within a larger cosmos of forces and others.
I'm a great fan of Krasznahorkai's work. He may not be a god to me, but he's one of the best writers around. Animalinside may be pretty elusive to someone starting cold with Krasznahorkai; The Melancholy of Resistance, which was the basis of Bela Tarr's amazing film The Werckmeister Harmonies, offers a more grounded point of entry. But the book is gorgeous and short, and it makes itself strongly felt even as it remains oblique.
Animalinside is a formal experiment for Hungarian author Krasznahorkai. Krasznahorkai wrote a text to accompany a drawing by Max Neumann, and Neumann drew over a dozen more in response, and Krasznahorkai wrote a short text for each one. There's an obvious unity to it all: the pictures all feature the (usually) black silhouette of some sort of feral animal poised to jump, and the texts are all about some sort of beast or beasts, usually written in the first person singular or plural.
The beast is angry, but helpless. The beast rants about how he is beyond any constraint that can be put on him by thought or concept. He is unique and beyond comparison: "It is impossible to confuse me with anyone else." He is within you, caged in one picture, but he is struggling to break free. And so another of Krasznahorkai's conceptual contradictions emerges: the beast that is at once free beyond everything and yet trapped.
Is the beast railing at the infinite itself, the inadequacy of the concept of the infinite, or the representation of the infinite (as in this picture)? I'm not sure. This tension is the same one that occurred in Krasznahorkai's earlier From the North by Hill, from the South by Lake, from the West by Roads, from the East by River, which contained a book by a mad Frenchman ranting against Cantor's mathematical conception of infinity. Perhaps the idea is that the conception traps us while simultaneously facing us with its inadequacy, and this is unbearable because, as with the ideas of mortality and immortality, neither side is a conceivable solution.
Because the text is more rarefied and abstract than Kraznahorkai's other work, it seems to resemble Beckett at times. But Beckett never portrayed such a vicious antagonism. His personae always collapse into themselves. Even their assertions of antagonism are hopeful but futile gestures against solipsistic nightmares. That is not the case in Krasznahorkai. I do not think it ever is. His characters and voices are always struggling within a larger cosmos of forces and others.
I'm a great fan of Krasznahorkai's work. He may not be a god to me, but he's one of the best writers around. Animalinside may be pretty elusive to someone starting cold with Krasznahorkai; The Melancholy of Resistance, which was the basis of Bela Tarr's amazing film The Werckmeister Harmonies, offers a more grounded point of entry. But the book is gorgeous and short, and it makes itself strongly felt even as it remains oblique.
July 27, 2023
Animalinside by Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, in collaboration with German artist Max Neumann, is a narrative exploration of a strange creature, born from a painting, that seeks to understand its place within infinity. The creature, depicted as a dog-like figure confined yet struggling for freedom, symbolizes contradictions and ambiguities reminiscent of Beckett's work. This complex yet minimalistic narrative explores the creature's raw, uncontained desire for freedom and its challenging paradoxical existence. As an open text, it resists definitive conclusions and invites readers into a realm of endless possibilities. Despite the declared extinction of language, memory, and judgment, the creatures' futile claim to kingship echoes a desperate existence. The book, published by New Directions, showcases Krasznahorkai's fascination with language as a tool for creating new myths amid modern chaos.
Read
December 24, 2023a great shame this is out of print. very interesting collaborative art piece
July 2, 2011
this is a very well done book. It seems like a bit of a language game. It's like he's walking around the phrase the animal inside and describing what it looks like from all angles, like an artist walking around a chair and redrawing it from various angles. It even at times looks almost the same just like from some perspectives a chair will look almost the same even though you're in a completely different place. what does it mean, is it a metaphor, is it literal, is it biblical.
this was a good idea.
this was a good idea.
May 29, 2025
I mean, it's László Krasznahorkai and Max Neumann - there's no circumstance where this wouldn't be good. But ultimately I read this as more of a writing prompt exercise in creative abstractions and sensory impressions than it is a "story" (in both the conventional and unconventional sense of the word). Its scarcity has saddled the last few circulating copies with a high price tag, despite the fact the author's readily available texts pack a significantly heavier punch. We all do love our little units of ephemera though, don't we? To that, I'm not immune.
July 26, 2012
One of the most terrifying books I've ever read.
March 13, 2017
The hypnotic texts lull the reader into a state regression bringing out the most introceptive part of the self in a feeling of timelessness.
November 3, 2025
There is a creature inside the book, and it was there before you ever opened it. It watches as your fingers touch the cover, waiting for the small act of violence that is reading — the tearing open of silence. 'Animalinside', that monstrous collaboration between László Krasznahorkai and the painter Max Neumann, is not a book you read; it is one you enter at your own peril. The pages feel less like paper and more like a membrane — a fragile film between two worlds: the human and the unspeakable.
The voice inside is already speaking before you’ve even turned the first page. It is a voice without lungs, a hunger that has learned to articulate itself. From the opening sentence, Krasznahorkai unspools a monologue that sounds like the last confession of a species realizing its own obsolescence.
This creature, the so-called “animal inside,” speaks as if it has always been there — a ghost lodged in the architecture of language. It knows it is trapped, and it knows who trapped it. You, the reader, become the target of its rage. Every sentence is an accusation: you are the one who built this cage of meaning, this prison of civility. You, with your words, your rationality, your belief in form — you made the bars that hold it in. And now it wants out. Krasznahorkai’s prose, famously labyrinthine and relentless, takes this desire for release and stretches it to its breaking point. There are no chapters, no reprieve, only long, suffocating passages that pile clause upon clause until syntax itself begins to collapse under the pressure. Reading becomes breathing through fabric — you can do it, but barely.
What makes 'Animalinside' extraordinary is that it stages this collapse across two languages: the verbal and the visual. Neumann’s paintings are not mere illustrations; they are co-conspirators. Each of his images feels like the residue of something unspeakable — faceless silhouettes, distorted torsos, blurred limbs caught mid-motion, neither alive nor dead. They do not depict the animal but rather the aftermath of its presence.
The figures are ghostly, drained of identity, floating in an atmosphere thick with dread. It’s as if Neumann painted the echo of the creature’s movements, the visual trace of its hunger. Krasznahorkai provides the voice; Neumann, the haunting silence that surrounds it. Together, they form a single organism — a text-image hybrid whose very structure enacts the tension it describes.
The experience of reading this tome is that of watching meaning corrode in real time. The animal’s voice is not just angry; it is metaphysical, almost cosmic in its despair. It speaks of confinement not merely in physical terms but as an existential condition. The “inside” of the title becomes a symbol for the human mind itself — a space both sacred and diseased.
The animal’s desire to break free becomes indistinguishable from the writer’s own desire to escape the limitations of language. Krasznahorkai uses the creature as a metaphor for thought itself, pacing within the skull, desperate for release into pure expression but always dragged back by grammar, by meaning, by the polite tyranny of coherence.
Neumann mirrors this philosophical struggle in the way his figures resist recognition. They seem human at first glance, but the longer you look, the less human they become.
Faces blur into smudges, hands dissolve into mist. They are beings in the act of vanishing — not victims of violence but embodiments of it. Their stillness vibrates. The figures appear to be emerging from or sinking into the page, just as Krasznahorkai’s sentences seem to rise from silence only to be swallowed again. The result is a symphony of disappearance, a duet between language and line, each trying to out-erode the other.
The translator, Ottilie Mulzet, deserves recognition here because her English carries the pulse of the original Hungarian like a transplanted organ that still beats to its old rhythm. She preserves Krasznahorkai’s cascading syntax, the hypnotic flow that blurs thought and incantation. There are moments where the prose feels almost sacred in its insistence — as though the very act of writing were an invocation against despair. Mulzet’s translation captures that intensity without smoothing its roughness. The language remains jagged, alive, untamed — a fitting vessel for a text that is itself about the impossibility of containment.
Colm Tóibín, in his preface, calls this collaboration “a hymn to rage,” and he’s right — but it’s also a hymn to persistence. Rage, in Krasznahorkai’s hands, is not a destructive force but a way of asserting existence. The animal’s voice, though filled with hatred and anguish, is ultimately a testament to endurance. It refuses silence. Even when it knows it cannot escape, it keeps speaking, keeps pushing against the invisible walls of the page. That relentless momentum is the novel’s dark heart: movement without destination, desire without satisfaction, life without peace.
The tone of the book oscillates between fury and despair, but underneath both lies an almost mystical current. Krasznahorkai’s vision of the world is apocalyptic, yes, but not nihilistic. His apocalypse is not the end of the world but the end of illusion.
The animal’s destruction of language is a purging, a stripping away of lies — a way to see what lies beneath civilization’s skin. It’s as if the author wants to reveal the sacred hidden within the monstrous. Neumann’s paintings echo this theology of decay. His use of muted tones — ash-gray, flesh-pink, and shadow-black — suggests not death but metamorphosis. Each figure seems to hover between dissolution and rebirth. The paintings are wounds that won’t close, but they are also thresholds.
The collaboration feels prophetic in its timing. First published in 2010, *Animalinside* reads today like an allegory for the 21st century’s moral exhaustion. The animal could be the unconscious of a civilization that has caged itself in technology and bureaucracy. Its rage is the rage of nature, of instinct, of the body against abstraction.
Krasznahorkai’s refusal to offer comfort mirrors our collective paralysis: we are aware of the cage but too complicit in its construction to dismantle it. Reading this in the aftermath of pandemics, wars, and algorithmic control, one feels the animal’s fury as one’s own — the longing to break through the endless mediation and touch something raw, real, unfiltered.
And yet, the book resists allegory. It refuses to be reduced to a single interpretation. That’s part of its menace. Every time you think you’ve pinned down what the “animal” represents — rage, instinct, the unconscious, God, art — it slips away, reconfigures itself, and turns its teeth toward you. Krasznahorkai’s writing thrives on this slipperiness.
His sentences operate like mazes that loop back on themselves, never arriving, always deferring meaning. Reading him is like walking through fog: you move forward, but every step erases the ground behind you.
Neumann’s visual rhythm complements this beautifully. He understands that horror is not in the spectacle but in the suggestion. His paintings are quiet, but that quiet hums with terror. Each image arrives like a breath between Krasznahorkai’s paragraphs — not a reprieve, but an inhalation before the next descent. The interplay between text and image creates a rhythm that feels almost liturgical: reading, seeing, pausing, trembling, then reading again. The book becomes a ritual, an exorcism performed in two languages.
One could argue that 'Animalinside' is less a tome than a performance of reading itself. Krasznahorkai manipulates the reader’s attention with sadistic precision. His long sentences force you to slow down, to feel the weight of every clause, to inhabit the exhaustion of the creature. You cannot skim 'Animalinside'; it will not let you. The act of reading becomes an act of endurance, mirroring the animal’s own struggle for release. This alignment between form and content is what makes Krasznahorkai’s work so devastating. He doesn’t describe confinement; he makes you feel it.
In this sense, 'Animalinside' is also a meditation on art as violence — not metaphorical violence, but the real kind, enacted upon perception. Neumann wounds the eye; Krasznahorkai wounds the mind. The book’s beauty lies in its refusal to heal. It does not invite interpretation as much as it demands complicity. The reader becomes a participant in the animal’s confinement, a witness and an accomplice. When the creature rages, it is raging through you. When it says, “I am coming,” you feel the tremor in your own bones.
And then, something strange happens. Somewhere around the midpoint, the rage begins to change color. It becomes less destructive and more revelatory, as if the animal, in speaking, discovers something like consciousness. Krasznahorkai’s language starts to shimmer with a kind of tragic grace. There are moments when the sentences reach a pitch of ecstatic despair — the creature no longer merely howls but prophesies.
It begins to sound like a saint or a poet, aware of its doom but still capable of vision. This transformation — from brute anger to metaphysical lament — is where the novel transcends its premise. The animal becomes a stand-in for the artist: condemned to speak, incapable of silence, tearing itself apart to reach something divine.
Neumann’s paintings follow suit. The later images grow softer, lighter, as if the violence has turned inward. The figures still lack faces, but their postures seem less aggressive, more contemplative. One can almost sense an uneasy peace settling over the visual field — not resolution, but resignation. The animal has accepted the impossibility of escape. What remains is a kind of sublime exhaustion, a quiet acknowledgment that the act of resistance is itself a form of existence.
By the time you reach the end, this book has consumed you. The final pages leave you with no closure, no enlightenment, only the residue of contact — that feeling of having brushed against something ancient and unnameable.
The animal doesn’t die; it simply stops speaking. Neumann’s final image lingers like an afterimage of consciousness — a dark figure caught mid-motion, perhaps retreating into shadow, perhaps emerging from it. The ambiguity is deliberate. Krasznahorkai does not believe in endings. He believes in continuations that spiral infinitely inward.
It’s impossible to talk about 'Animalinside' without acknowledging the sheer audacity of its minimalism. Barely 96 pages long, it feels larger than most epics. That’s because Krasznahorkai compresses vast emotional and philosophical territory into every sentence. His style, often compared to Beckett and Bernhard, here achieves something close to scripture — not in message, but in cadence.
There’s a biblical resonance to his repetition, an apocalyptic grandeur to his despair. Every line sounds as though it were written on the edge of revelation. Neumann’s paintings amplify that effect, their simplicity acting as a counterweight to the text’s density. Together, they create a balance — word as chaos, image as silence.
And yet, calling it balance feels too polite. What exists between them is tension, a violent coexistence. Krasznahorkai’s prose wants to consume the world; Neumann’s images want to erase it. The beauty of the book lies in that struggle — the refusal of either form to dominate. This is why *Animalinside* feels alive. It is not a harmony but a conflict sustained across mediums. The text scratches at the surface of the image; the image swallows the text whole. What emerges is a language of mutual destruction that somehow becomes transcendence.
The more one thinks about it, the more this book feels like a mirror — not reflecting our faces but our absence. In its dark grammar and ghostly silhouettes, it captures the spiritual exhaustion of our age: a time when language has lost faith in itself and images have become noise. Krasznahorkai and Neumann respond not with cynicism but with intensity. They do not try to fix meaning; they make it tremble. That trembling, that refusal to stabilize, is their gift — the one honest response to a world built on illusion.
By the end, you are left with a paradox: the animal is inside, but it is also outside. It is the book, the reader, the voice, the void. It is the hunger that makes art possible and the violence that keeps it alive. Krasznahorkai’s sentences continue to echo long after you close the book, like footsteps in an empty corridor. Neumann’s shadows cling to your vision, flickering at the edges of your sight. You realize that the animal has not escaped — it has simply moved in.
That is the triumph of 'Animalinside': it doesn’t offer understanding; it offers infection. It leaves you altered, feral, uncertain of your own boundaries. Krasznahorkai and Neumann, in their unholy alliance, have created not a book but a contagion — a meditation on what happens when art stops describing the world and starts devouring it. You finish the last page with the eerie sense that something has been unchained — not in the book, but in you. And the silence that follows is not relief. It is waiting.
Try it out.
The voice inside is already speaking before you’ve even turned the first page. It is a voice without lungs, a hunger that has learned to articulate itself. From the opening sentence, Krasznahorkai unspools a monologue that sounds like the last confession of a species realizing its own obsolescence.
This creature, the so-called “animal inside,” speaks as if it has always been there — a ghost lodged in the architecture of language. It knows it is trapped, and it knows who trapped it. You, the reader, become the target of its rage. Every sentence is an accusation: you are the one who built this cage of meaning, this prison of civility. You, with your words, your rationality, your belief in form — you made the bars that hold it in. And now it wants out. Krasznahorkai’s prose, famously labyrinthine and relentless, takes this desire for release and stretches it to its breaking point. There are no chapters, no reprieve, only long, suffocating passages that pile clause upon clause until syntax itself begins to collapse under the pressure. Reading becomes breathing through fabric — you can do it, but barely.
What makes 'Animalinside' extraordinary is that it stages this collapse across two languages: the verbal and the visual. Neumann’s paintings are not mere illustrations; they are co-conspirators. Each of his images feels like the residue of something unspeakable — faceless silhouettes, distorted torsos, blurred limbs caught mid-motion, neither alive nor dead. They do not depict the animal but rather the aftermath of its presence.
The figures are ghostly, drained of identity, floating in an atmosphere thick with dread. It’s as if Neumann painted the echo of the creature’s movements, the visual trace of its hunger. Krasznahorkai provides the voice; Neumann, the haunting silence that surrounds it. Together, they form a single organism — a text-image hybrid whose very structure enacts the tension it describes.
The experience of reading this tome is that of watching meaning corrode in real time. The animal’s voice is not just angry; it is metaphysical, almost cosmic in its despair. It speaks of confinement not merely in physical terms but as an existential condition. The “inside” of the title becomes a symbol for the human mind itself — a space both sacred and diseased.
The animal’s desire to break free becomes indistinguishable from the writer’s own desire to escape the limitations of language. Krasznahorkai uses the creature as a metaphor for thought itself, pacing within the skull, desperate for release into pure expression but always dragged back by grammar, by meaning, by the polite tyranny of coherence.
Neumann mirrors this philosophical struggle in the way his figures resist recognition. They seem human at first glance, but the longer you look, the less human they become.
Faces blur into smudges, hands dissolve into mist. They are beings in the act of vanishing — not victims of violence but embodiments of it. Their stillness vibrates. The figures appear to be emerging from or sinking into the page, just as Krasznahorkai’s sentences seem to rise from silence only to be swallowed again. The result is a symphony of disappearance, a duet between language and line, each trying to out-erode the other.
The translator, Ottilie Mulzet, deserves recognition here because her English carries the pulse of the original Hungarian like a transplanted organ that still beats to its old rhythm. She preserves Krasznahorkai’s cascading syntax, the hypnotic flow that blurs thought and incantation. There are moments where the prose feels almost sacred in its insistence — as though the very act of writing were an invocation against despair. Mulzet’s translation captures that intensity without smoothing its roughness. The language remains jagged, alive, untamed — a fitting vessel for a text that is itself about the impossibility of containment.
Colm Tóibín, in his preface, calls this collaboration “a hymn to rage,” and he’s right — but it’s also a hymn to persistence. Rage, in Krasznahorkai’s hands, is not a destructive force but a way of asserting existence. The animal’s voice, though filled with hatred and anguish, is ultimately a testament to endurance. It refuses silence. Even when it knows it cannot escape, it keeps speaking, keeps pushing against the invisible walls of the page. That relentless momentum is the novel’s dark heart: movement without destination, desire without satisfaction, life without peace.
The tone of the book oscillates between fury and despair, but underneath both lies an almost mystical current. Krasznahorkai’s vision of the world is apocalyptic, yes, but not nihilistic. His apocalypse is not the end of the world but the end of illusion.
The animal’s destruction of language is a purging, a stripping away of lies — a way to see what lies beneath civilization’s skin. It’s as if the author wants to reveal the sacred hidden within the monstrous. Neumann’s paintings echo this theology of decay. His use of muted tones — ash-gray, flesh-pink, and shadow-black — suggests not death but metamorphosis. Each figure seems to hover between dissolution and rebirth. The paintings are wounds that won’t close, but they are also thresholds.
The collaboration feels prophetic in its timing. First published in 2010, *Animalinside* reads today like an allegory for the 21st century’s moral exhaustion. The animal could be the unconscious of a civilization that has caged itself in technology and bureaucracy. Its rage is the rage of nature, of instinct, of the body against abstraction.
Krasznahorkai’s refusal to offer comfort mirrors our collective paralysis: we are aware of the cage but too complicit in its construction to dismantle it. Reading this in the aftermath of pandemics, wars, and algorithmic control, one feels the animal’s fury as one’s own — the longing to break through the endless mediation and touch something raw, real, unfiltered.
And yet, the book resists allegory. It refuses to be reduced to a single interpretation. That’s part of its menace. Every time you think you’ve pinned down what the “animal” represents — rage, instinct, the unconscious, God, art — it slips away, reconfigures itself, and turns its teeth toward you. Krasznahorkai’s writing thrives on this slipperiness.
His sentences operate like mazes that loop back on themselves, never arriving, always deferring meaning. Reading him is like walking through fog: you move forward, but every step erases the ground behind you.
Neumann’s visual rhythm complements this beautifully. He understands that horror is not in the spectacle but in the suggestion. His paintings are quiet, but that quiet hums with terror. Each image arrives like a breath between Krasznahorkai’s paragraphs — not a reprieve, but an inhalation before the next descent. The interplay between text and image creates a rhythm that feels almost liturgical: reading, seeing, pausing, trembling, then reading again. The book becomes a ritual, an exorcism performed in two languages.
One could argue that 'Animalinside' is less a tome than a performance of reading itself. Krasznahorkai manipulates the reader’s attention with sadistic precision. His long sentences force you to slow down, to feel the weight of every clause, to inhabit the exhaustion of the creature. You cannot skim 'Animalinside'; it will not let you. The act of reading becomes an act of endurance, mirroring the animal’s own struggle for release. This alignment between form and content is what makes Krasznahorkai’s work so devastating. He doesn’t describe confinement; he makes you feel it.
In this sense, 'Animalinside' is also a meditation on art as violence — not metaphorical violence, but the real kind, enacted upon perception. Neumann wounds the eye; Krasznahorkai wounds the mind. The book’s beauty lies in its refusal to heal. It does not invite interpretation as much as it demands complicity. The reader becomes a participant in the animal’s confinement, a witness and an accomplice. When the creature rages, it is raging through you. When it says, “I am coming,” you feel the tremor in your own bones.
And then, something strange happens. Somewhere around the midpoint, the rage begins to change color. It becomes less destructive and more revelatory, as if the animal, in speaking, discovers something like consciousness. Krasznahorkai’s language starts to shimmer with a kind of tragic grace. There are moments when the sentences reach a pitch of ecstatic despair — the creature no longer merely howls but prophesies.
It begins to sound like a saint or a poet, aware of its doom but still capable of vision. This transformation — from brute anger to metaphysical lament — is where the novel transcends its premise. The animal becomes a stand-in for the artist: condemned to speak, incapable of silence, tearing itself apart to reach something divine.
Neumann’s paintings follow suit. The later images grow softer, lighter, as if the violence has turned inward. The figures still lack faces, but their postures seem less aggressive, more contemplative. One can almost sense an uneasy peace settling over the visual field — not resolution, but resignation. The animal has accepted the impossibility of escape. What remains is a kind of sublime exhaustion, a quiet acknowledgment that the act of resistance is itself a form of existence.
By the time you reach the end, this book has consumed you. The final pages leave you with no closure, no enlightenment, only the residue of contact — that feeling of having brushed against something ancient and unnameable.
The animal doesn’t die; it simply stops speaking. Neumann’s final image lingers like an afterimage of consciousness — a dark figure caught mid-motion, perhaps retreating into shadow, perhaps emerging from it. The ambiguity is deliberate. Krasznahorkai does not believe in endings. He believes in continuations that spiral infinitely inward.
It’s impossible to talk about 'Animalinside' without acknowledging the sheer audacity of its minimalism. Barely 96 pages long, it feels larger than most epics. That’s because Krasznahorkai compresses vast emotional and philosophical territory into every sentence. His style, often compared to Beckett and Bernhard, here achieves something close to scripture — not in message, but in cadence.
There’s a biblical resonance to his repetition, an apocalyptic grandeur to his despair. Every line sounds as though it were written on the edge of revelation. Neumann’s paintings amplify that effect, their simplicity acting as a counterweight to the text’s density. Together, they create a balance — word as chaos, image as silence.
And yet, calling it balance feels too polite. What exists between them is tension, a violent coexistence. Krasznahorkai’s prose wants to consume the world; Neumann’s images want to erase it. The beauty of the book lies in that struggle — the refusal of either form to dominate. This is why *Animalinside* feels alive. It is not a harmony but a conflict sustained across mediums. The text scratches at the surface of the image; the image swallows the text whole. What emerges is a language of mutual destruction that somehow becomes transcendence.
The more one thinks about it, the more this book feels like a mirror — not reflecting our faces but our absence. In its dark grammar and ghostly silhouettes, it captures the spiritual exhaustion of our age: a time when language has lost faith in itself and images have become noise. Krasznahorkai and Neumann respond not with cynicism but with intensity. They do not try to fix meaning; they make it tremble. That trembling, that refusal to stabilize, is their gift — the one honest response to a world built on illusion.
By the end, you are left with a paradox: the animal is inside, but it is also outside. It is the book, the reader, the voice, the void. It is the hunger that makes art possible and the violence that keeps it alive. Krasznahorkai’s sentences continue to echo long after you close the book, like footsteps in an empty corridor. Neumann’s shadows cling to your vision, flickering at the edges of your sight. You realize that the animal has not escaped — it has simply moved in.
That is the triumph of 'Animalinside': it doesn’t offer understanding; it offers infection. It leaves you altered, feral, uncertain of your own boundaries. Krasznahorkai and Neumann, in their unholy alliance, have created not a book but a contagion — a meditation on what happens when art stops describing the world and starts devouring it. You finish the last page with the eerie sense that something has been unchained — not in the book, but in you. And the silence that follows is not relief. It is waiting.
Try it out.
August 4, 2014
Yet another beautiful Cahier in the series by Sylph Editions.
������Max Neumann is well known for his often eerie portraits that echo psychological states; L��szl�_ Krasznahorkai is well known for his eerie, maddening, and Kafkaesque prose that delves into individuals��� relations to power structures and each other. Responding first to an image of Neumann���s depicting a terrifying yet incomprehensible animal, Krasznahorkai set the chain of collaboration that would become Animalinside into motion; Neumann���s resulting images���from the first textual response���are increasingly more horrifying, and Krasznahorkai���s prose follows this animal���s story in his typical long sentences with repetitive rhythms and compact rhetorical ways of rendering diction, e.g., ���I extendextendextend around the Earth at the Equator��� and ������so so sooo big that I extend across two galaxies, if I want and soooo so big that extend across one hundred galaxies.���
Animalinside is about annihilation and apocalypse, but it is more harrowing than that: in identifying our fears and anxieties about power, Krasznahorkai shows that those in positions of power harbor the same kinds of misgivings that we do. In a sense, power entraps us in a very Foucauldian way, and to speak about power���to paraphrase Foucault���is only something that can be done from inside existing power structures. Krasznahorkai���s animal is inside us (���I, that thing that looks so ghastly, is within you, because I am within you���); at the same time, the animal appears to exhibit traits of alienation and isolation that characterize Krasznahorkai���s characters in other work. The impact of this here is to suggest that while we criticize power structures which cage us (���this space-cage... a cage made to my measurements���), preventing us from realizing our individuality, we are, oddly enough, complicit in our victimization within this totalizing hierarchy. ������
Krasznahorkai���s instruments of power are panoptic:
������Called ���the Hungarian master of the apocalypse��� by Susan Sontag, Animalinside shows Krasznahorkai grappling with similar questions that his longer fictions consider; alongside Neumann���s images���often reminiscent of Munch���s Scream (���but what I hate most is how I���m howling here into the infinite���)���the paralyzing fear as we observe our own systemic collapse is made all the more uncanny, absurd, and downright chilling.
������Max Neumann is well known for his often eerie portraits that echo psychological states; L��szl�_ Krasznahorkai is well known for his eerie, maddening, and Kafkaesque prose that delves into individuals��� relations to power structures and each other. Responding first to an image of Neumann���s depicting a terrifying yet incomprehensible animal, Krasznahorkai set the chain of collaboration that would become Animalinside into motion; Neumann���s resulting images���from the first textual response���are increasingly more horrifying, and Krasznahorkai���s prose follows this animal���s story in his typical long sentences with repetitive rhythms and compact rhetorical ways of rendering diction, e.g., ���I extendextendextend around the Earth at the Equator��� and ������so so sooo big that I extend across two galaxies, if I want and soooo so big that extend across one hundred galaxies.���
Animalinside is about annihilation and apocalypse, but it is more harrowing than that: in identifying our fears and anxieties about power, Krasznahorkai shows that those in positions of power harbor the same kinds of misgivings that we do. In a sense, power entraps us in a very Foucauldian way, and to speak about power���to paraphrase Foucault���is only something that can be done from inside existing power structures. Krasznahorkai���s animal is inside us (���I, that thing that looks so ghastly, is within you, because I am within you���); at the same time, the animal appears to exhibit traits of alienation and isolation that characterize Krasznahorkai���s characters in other work. The impact of this here is to suggest that while we criticize power structures which cage us (���this space-cage... a cage made to my measurements���), preventing us from realizing our individuality, we are, oddly enough, complicit in our victimization within this totalizing hierarchy. ������
Krasznahorkai���s instruments of power are panoptic:
and that���s how life ends for you, because it is impossible to hide away from us, there is no depth within the earth that could be a refuge for you, we are here, above, here, look we���re watching from up here what you���re doing down there, but we don���t have to watch everything, because we know everything about you... I am inscrutable and indivisible and impenetrable...������And the end, as Krasznahorkai sees it here, is hardly something that can be prepared for or reckoned with because all of our cultural myths���and, too, the many ways in which we externalize power/knowledge systems, again to bring Foucault to mind���fail to consider that the true apocalypse does not come from outside, but from within:
every aspiration to the infinite is a trap... and don���t count on me emerging from below the earth, and it is not from the mountains or from the heavens that I shall arrive, every picture drawn in anxiety, ever word written down in horror, every voice sounded in anguish with which you try to prophesize me is senseless, for there is no need of prophecy, there is no need for you to evoke me before I arrive, it will be enough to see me then...A true revolt, then, is impossible, and Krasznahorkai���s pessimism is obviously on display here, but there is also an overriding sense of sympathy for this animal despite his malevolence and his destructive intent: ���if I jump up to sink my teeth into your throat, I hump into the trap definitively and inevitably, there is no point in speaking of escape. Into your throat.���
������Called ���the Hungarian master of the apocalypse��� by Susan Sontag, Animalinside shows Krasznahorkai grappling with similar questions that his longer fictions consider; alongside Neumann���s images���often reminiscent of Munch���s Scream (���but what I hate most is how I���m howling here into the infinite���)���the paralyzing fear as we observe our own systemic collapse is made all the more uncanny, absurd, and downright chilling.
September 3, 2011
Sure, you could probably read the text of this on a Kindle or Nook. But you'd be missing everything, and I don't just mean the Neumann images. This book actually smells good! It feels good. It's a tactile experience that engages your eyes and other senses, while your brain tries to solve the mystery of who is the Animalinside.
First off, this is a novella that started with a Neumann painting that inspired Krasznahorai's text about a creature that defies easy description. After that, Neumann provided more images with the same dog-like beast, to inspire further chapters from the Hungarian author. Prefaced by Colm Toibin, who states that the author "stands closer to Kafka than to Beckett, but he is close to neither in his interest and delight in verbal pyrotechnics, in allowing the sheer energy of his long exciting sentences full sway."
The monster of the story, if indeed that is what it is, is trapped in a place where he is excluded and in pain. "...I don't even exist, I only howl, and howling is not identical with existence, on the contrary howling is despair, the horror of that instance of awakening when the condemned--myself--comes to realize that he has been excluded from existence and there is no way back..."
The words of the beast, shown in the images as a sort of fierce two-legged dog, are almost always horrifying...caged, it waits for release to wreak havoc and battle for kingship over a wasteland of earth. At lighter moments, though, it speaks almost in a panic over the search for its food dish, but the threats he makes about its loss are nothing adorable.
Much of the imagery and words confuse me...I sense that a deeper measure of the meaning involves the ugly results of binding the voices of small, defenseless peoples until their defense is their only option. Their obsession.
And about that, "smells good" remark? New Directions designed this as part of their Cahiers series, #14, and it's designed in a seven step printing process that makes for thick, waxy pages, with layers of thick inks and contrasting textures. Maybe it's all the chemicals involved, but it smells and feels amazing. Heirloom-quality, if that's possible for a novella.
First off, this is a novella that started with a Neumann painting that inspired Krasznahorai's text about a creature that defies easy description. After that, Neumann provided more images with the same dog-like beast, to inspire further chapters from the Hungarian author. Prefaced by Colm Toibin, who states that the author "stands closer to Kafka than to Beckett, but he is close to neither in his interest and delight in verbal pyrotechnics, in allowing the sheer energy of his long exciting sentences full sway."
The monster of the story, if indeed that is what it is, is trapped in a place where he is excluded and in pain. "...I don't even exist, I only howl, and howling is not identical with existence, on the contrary howling is despair, the horror of that instance of awakening when the condemned--myself--comes to realize that he has been excluded from existence and there is no way back..."
The words of the beast, shown in the images as a sort of fierce two-legged dog, are almost always horrifying...caged, it waits for release to wreak havoc and battle for kingship over a wasteland of earth. At lighter moments, though, it speaks almost in a panic over the search for its food dish, but the threats he makes about its loss are nothing adorable.
Much of the imagery and words confuse me...I sense that a deeper measure of the meaning involves the ugly results of binding the voices of small, defenseless peoples until their defense is their only option. Their obsession.
And about that, "smells good" remark? New Directions designed this as part of their Cahiers series, #14, and it's designed in a seven step printing process that makes for thick, waxy pages, with layers of thick inks and contrasting textures. Maybe it's all the chemicals involved, but it smells and feels amazing. Heirloom-quality, if that's possible for a novella.
October 19, 2011
"He wants to break free, attempts to stretch open the walls, but he has been tautened there by them, and there he remains in this tautening, in this constraint, and there is nothing else to do but howl, and now and forever he shall be nothing but his own tautening and his own howling, everything he was is no more, everything that could shall never be, so that for him there is not even anything that is. They have placed him inside this moment, but in doing so have excluded him from the moment previous, as well as the one to follow, so that he howls with one howl, expelled from time, trapped in one space ill-matched to his proportions, because the problem is the space, he has nothing in common with this space, in the entire God-given world he has nothing in common with this structure, with these perspectives, these perspectives are not made for him to exist in them, so that he doesn't even exist, he only howls, and this howling is not identical with existence, on the contrary howling is despair, the unspeakable horror of that instance of awakening with the condemned comes to realize that he has been excluded from existence, and there is no way back, if there ever even was a way here, he has been caught in a trap, there is no escape, and everything hurts, that one thing still belonging to him hurts, the fact that he ended up here, in this space ill-matched to his proportions, and he howls, he howls I want to break out, I want to stretch open the walls, but they have tautened me here, and here I remain in this tautening, in this constraint, and there is nothing else for me to do but howl, and now and forever I shall be nothing but my own tautening and my own howling, everything that there was for me has become nothing, everything that could ever be for me is naught, so that for me there is nothing that even is."
November 22, 2015
Where are you, my little master...
Laszlo Krasznahorkai's writing hypnotizes me every time. If you've read anything by him, you know what I mean-- the manic stream of anxious consciousness pulls you in like a black hole and there is no escape, no grammatical relief as the sentences swirl on and on from line to line, zig-zagging across the page like lacerations bleeding letters and you can't wipe it away, can't for a moment even think of wiping it away because the wound of the sentence is still open, still gushing words with each moment and before you know it the entire page is nothing but a smear of ink and there is nothing left, nothing left to save and all you can do is turn the page but even then, you know, there will only be more, ever always more, and so much more, and there is nothing you can do and there is no where for you to turn except the next page.
Oh my little master, please, won't you give me my food dish?
However, unlike with his novels where you can just keep reading on and on and sink ever deeper into the pit of awareness, this book is better read in short bursts. Read a passage a day. Savor it.
When I find you... my little master....
Laszlo Krasznahorkai's writing hypnotizes me every time. If you've read anything by him, you know what I mean-- the manic stream of anxious consciousness pulls you in like a black hole and there is no escape, no grammatical relief as the sentences swirl on and on from line to line, zig-zagging across the page like lacerations bleeding letters and you can't wipe it away, can't for a moment even think of wiping it away because the wound of the sentence is still open, still gushing words with each moment and before you know it the entire page is nothing but a smear of ink and there is nothing left, nothing left to save and all you can do is turn the page but even then, you know, there will only be more, ever always more, and so much more, and there is nothing you can do and there is no where for you to turn except the next page.
Oh my little master, please, won't you give me my food dish?
However, unlike with his novels where you can just keep reading on and on and sink ever deeper into the pit of awareness, this book is better read in short bursts. Read a passage a day. Savor it.
When I find you... my little master....
June 22, 2011
I almost wish I hadn't read Melancholy of Resistance and War and War before this - because I want more of that. The thingitself is great - awesome printing, yes it smells cool, yes it looks awesome but I'm left wanting Satantango to arrive in English so I can get back to the longer form Krasznahorkai that I enjoyed so much more than this. Readers who are experiencing him for the first time through this work should certainly read his other available works to really get the level of mastery this writer achieves. I'll admit that when I visualize Krasznahorkai it's certainly through the images presented by Bela Tarr and even James Ensor who's Entry of Christ was used in part on the US cover of Melancholy of Resistance. Neumann's work has never greatly appealed to me and it leaves me a bit old here as well. It's obvious that Krasznahorkai doesn't share my indifference and that's really all that matters. It's a nice thing to own and as previously mentioned - it's a perfect example of why many book lovers shouldn't rush to get an e-reader and abandon paper. If my house burns down - I'd certainly replace Melancholy of Resistance and War and War before this.
January 29, 2014
More a pamphlet than a book but a very beautiful thing (until you spill coffee on it, never mind). Very well reproduced prints of paintings by max neuman with a short pieces from krasznahorkai inspired by the artwork. This works extremely well, the writing is him at his darkest and most apocalyptic but as always there is a strain of humour and mischief which runs through the whole work. Some of the pieces are just mesmerising.
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