The World Goes On; 11-28-2019

 [I am back working through my prison journal. It is out of order. The date in the title is the date it was written.Well, the order is as I have opened boxes. I hope this is not confusing. What you are reading is what you get for your tax dollars. sch 4/26/2025] 

Only minutes ago, I finished Laszlo Kraznahockai's The World Goes On (New Directions Books, 2017; John Batki, translator). This was after our prison Thanksgiving dinners (a slice of turkey breast, cornbread muffins, mashed potatoes, individual - almost midget - pecan pie, and ice cream), and watching a bootleg copy of Martin Scorsese's The Irishman (a grand collection of old men acting their butts off; it made me think of Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.)

These Eastern Europeans wear me out. I include W. G. Sebald in this group (he contributes a blurb to this collection), as well as the fellow who wrote Götz and Meyer. The last story I read was "That Gagarin" - a 30-page sentence that produces a story of madness. Sebald's Austerlitz, and this collection shares something frantic, something frenetic, that cuts a groove that will not let me out, I get the feeling of being in a car sliding on ice. I think this passage capture what I think Laszlo was up to:

...constantly brutalizing with the possibility that the things happen here, the things he has experienced, seen, and heard possess some sort of portentous connections, whereas there is no interconnection whatsoever, on an immense, unfathomable choas, or as this elphantine man would have put it, a powerful disorder, that's what we are talking about, a universal, all-consuming infectious chaos, this iswhat he must find his way out of, if there is a way out....

"A Drop of Water", pp. 215 - 15

About those ways out:

I don't want to die, but just to leave the Earth: this desire, however, ridiculous, is so strong that it's the only thing in me, like a deadly infection, it's rotting my soul. and it cuts into me, namely that in the midst of a generalyesterday it seized upon my soul, and well, the soul could no longer free itself, so that  well, yes: it would be so good to leave the Earth, but I mean to really leave it, to lift off, and go up and go ever higher into those dreadful heights....

"That Gagarin", p. 233 (Ottile Mulzet, translator)

***

... Since I already know leaving the Earth won't work from "my usual window" - that is, for me to open the window, step outside, push myself off, and there you have it, up I go - instead, after I've finished with everything (and I'll still give my notebook to Nurse Istvan), then I'll open the window here on the dixth floor, I'll stand on the windowsill and push myself off, because whatever doesn't go up with all certainty goes down. Because from the sixth floor to Paradise: the time has come.

 "That Gagarin", p. 270

He ends "A Drop of Water" this way:

... Making sure it was not four times, and not always to the left, or to the right, this is what screamed like a siren in his head, this thought, not four times, not in the same direction, because then there is no escape, then I will be back where I started.

p, 216

And I'm condensing "I Don't Need Anything From Here" (Ottile Mulzet, translator), a one-pager that I'm thinking of more as a tone poem or a meditation than a story; one paragraph consisting of one sentence.

I would leave everything here... because I would take nothing with me, because I've looked into what's coming, and I don't need anything from here.

p. 311

I think you can see his prose moves. Yes, he is not James Patterson. Neither would Patterson have done anything I find as funny as "The Swan of Istanbul", which is 16 blank pages and 5 pages of footnotes. Give Laszlo and yourself a chance. 

sch 

[4/26/2025: The fellow who wrote Götz and Meyer was David Albahari. He died almost 4 years after I wrote the above entry into my prison journal. My reading of Götz and Meyer is buried in one of these boxes, but let me say I highly recommend reading it. I believe I also read  one of his short stories in a Dalkey Archives anthology. His English translator wrote an appreciation of the man and the writer in David Albahari, In Memoriam (Kosovo 2.0). sch]