Spadework for a Palace
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
WINNER OF THE 2025 NOBEL PRIZE
A joyful ode—in a single soaring, crazy sentence—to the interconnectedness of great (and mad) minds
Spadework for a Palace bears the subtitle “Entering the Madness of Others” and offers an epigraph: “Reality is no obstacle.” Indeed. This high-octane obsessive rant vaults over all obstacles, fueled by the idées fixe of a “gray little librarian” with fallen arches whose name—mr herman melvill—is merely one of the coincidences binding him to his lodestar Herman Melville (“I too resided on East 26th Street . . . I, too, had worked for a while at the Customs Office”), which itself is just one aspect of his also being “constantly conscious of his connectedness” to Lebbeus Woods, to the rock that is Manhattan, to the “drunkard Lowry” and his Lunar Caustic, to Bartok. And with this consciousness of connection he is not only gaining true knowledge of Melville, but also tracing the paths to “a Serene Paradise of Knowledge.” Driven to save that Palace (a higher library he also serves), he loses his job and his wife leaves him, but “people must be told the truth: there is no dualism in existence.” And his dream will be “realized, for I am not giving up: I am merely a day-laborer, a spade-worker on this dream, a herman melvill, a librarian from the lending desk, currently an inmate at Bellevue, but at the same time—may I say this?—actually a Keeper of the Palace."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Krasznahorkai (Chasing Homer) offers a delightfully deranged narrative of a present-day New York Public Library employee whose character recalls Dostoyevsky's Underground Man and Melville's Bartleby. The narrator's name, in fact, is herman melvill, the lowercase styling perhaps meant to indicate his lowly self-regard compared to the classic author, whose work he reveres. The coincidence fuels his misanthropy—as a child, he endured taunts such as, "what's up with your whale, herman, why didn't you bring him along"; and now he's hounded by the occasional reporter and grad student "spouting a flurry of empty words." While Bartleby would prefer not to work, Krasznahorkai's melvill would prefer not to loan out books. He'd rather libraries be appreciated from a distance. His ideas, which have no practical sense but generate their own captivating beauty in the author's commitment to melvill's outlook, reflect his obsession with Melville as well as Malcolm Lowry and the experimental architect Lebbeus Woods, and once a day he retraces Melville's steps to the Hudson pier where Melville worked, as he imagined Lowry retraced them. As his employment status and sanity become increasingly tenuous, he finds meaning in Woods's embrace of catastrophe as an inevitable force, which Krasznahorkai conveys with rigor and remarkable simplicity. Capital L literature fans will love this.
