The World Goes On
Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2025
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- 7,49 €
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- 7,49 €
Publisher Description
FROM THE WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE 2025
Shortlisted for The Man Booker International Prize 2018
A Hungarian interpreter obsessed with waterfalls, at the edge of the abyss in his own mind, wanders the chaotic streets of Shanghai. A traveller, reeling from the sights and sounds of Varanasi, encounters a giant of a man on the banks of the Ganges ranting on the nature of a single drop of water. A child labourer in a Portuguese marble quarry wanders off from work one day into a surreal realm utterly alien from his daily toils.
In The World Goes On, a narrator first speaks directly, tells twenty-one unforgettable stories, then bids farewell ('for here I would leave this earth and these stars, because I would take nothing with me'). As László Krasznahorkai himself explains: 'Each text is about drawing our attention away from this world, speeding our body toward annihilation, and immersing ourselves in a current of thought or a narrative...'
The World Goes On is another masterpiece by the winner of the 2015 Man Booker International Prize. 'The excitement of his writing,' Adam Thirlwell proclaimed in the New York Review of Books, 'is that he has come up with his own original forms-there is nothing else like it in contemporary literature.'
Translated by Ottilie Muzlet, George Szirtes and John Batki
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Krasznahorkai's latest begins in a void, out of which speaks a voice who wants to escape the world, where everything "is intolerable, unbearable, cold, sad, bleak, and deathly." From there, the speaker embarks on a series of monologues in which he circles the globe, tries to outrun it, wants to forget it, then delivers three lectures on melancholy, revolt, and possession. These exercises concluded, a set of enigmatic short stories unfold. In "Nine Dragon Crossing," a man obsessed with waterfalls becomes lost in contemplation of the winding streets of Shanghai. In "One Time on the 381," a Portuguese miner stumbles upon a buried palace. The iconoclastic filmmaker of "Gy rgy Feh r's Henrik M lnar" recalls Krasznahorkai's own collaborations with director Bela Tarr. The ecstatic "A Drop of Water" concerns an encounter with a Buddha on the banks of the Ganges. Other stories take readers to a baroque and sensual Venice or resume the theme of leaving the world through the story of Russian cosmonaut Gagarin. In the end, the storyteller bids farewell and departs into eternity, leaving readers to puzzle over the parables, dialogues, and tales. This book breaks all conventions and tests the very limits of language, resulting in a transcendent, astounding experience.
