László Krasznahorkai

Al sur de Kioto, junto a la vía del tren de la línea de Keihan, a sólo una parada de la ciudad, hay un monasterio. Una escalada laberíntica conduce al nieto del príncipe de Genji a este lugar apartado. No muy lejos de allí, dicen, tiene que hallarse el jardín más hermoso del mundo. Camina por todo el recinto del monasterio como movido por una fuerza interior. Una construcción sutil ha dado forma a la naturaleza, cada cosa tiene su lugar y...

Tragicómica y melancólica, esta novela nos presenta un mundo plúmbeo y totalitario, dominado por fuerzas ciegas e impersonales. Un escenario humano desolador en el que la inteligencia es anulada por la fuerza bruta y la violencia, y en el que el caos arrastra irremediablemente a unos personajes que, entre el conformismo y la insignificancia, no aciertan a crear un orden nuevo menos cruel y menos gris. El estallido de violencia no alcanza siquiera...

"Set in contemporary times, Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming tells the story of a Prince Myshkin-like figure, Baron Bela Wenckheim, who decides to return at the end of his life to the provincial Hungarian town of his birth. Having escaped from his many casino debts in Buenos Aires, where he was living in exile, he wishes to be reunited with his high school sweetheart Marika. What follows is an endless storm of gossip, con men, and local politicians, vividly...

"A powerful, surreal novel, in the tradition of Gogol, about the chaotic events surrounding the arrival of a circus in a small Hungarian town. The Melancholy of Resistance, László Krasznahorkai's magisterial, surreal novel, depicts a chain of mysterious events in a small Hungarian town. A circus, promising to display the stuffed body of the largest whale in the world, arrives in the dead of winter, prompting bizarre rumors. Word spreads that the...

The Last Wolf, translated by George Szirtes, features a classic, obsessed Krasznahorkai narrator, a man hired to write (by mistake, by a glitch of fate) the true tale of the last wolf of Extremadura, a barren stretch of Spain. This miserable experience (being mistaken for another, dragged about a cold foreign place, appalled by a species end) is narrated all in a single sentence as a sad looping tale, a howl more or less, in a dreary wintry Berlin...

"The grandson of Prince Genji lives outside of space and time and wanders the grounds of an old monastery in Kyoto. The monastery, too, is timeless: a place of prayer and deliverance, with barely a trace of any human presence. The wanderer is searching for a garden that has long captivated him: "he continu- ally saw the garden in his mind's eye without being able to touch its existence." This exquisitely beautiful novel by National Book Award-winner...

"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...

A Japanese goddess returns to the mortal realms in search of a glimpse of perfection.

A circus arrives in a small village in Hungary. Instead of exotic animals and acrobats, it features jars of medical anomalies. It creates tension in the village as a shadowy figure incites violence among its inhabitants.