LÁSZLÓ KRASZNAHORKAI A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East. Reviewed by Ben Ford Smith
Without drama, plot or action, Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai has nevertheless created a compelling work of fiction.
Susan Sontag once described novelist László Krasznahorkai as ‘the Hungarian master of the apocalypse’. Many of Krasznahorkai’s previous works are indeed bleak affairs, tales of post-Soviet poverty and cultural emptiness in the void between a communist past and a bewildering globalised present. For all the squalor and loss in his previous work, however, his new book is all light and air.
It is hard to call it a novel, exactly. It has characters (at least one, possibly three if animals are counted) and one of these characters has a goal. It is told, like all of Krasznahorkai’s stories, in sentences that sometimes span pages, yet also in brief chapters, often of less than two pages. It is poetic, but it isn’t poetry. Somehow, despite all this, it is not a confusing book. Perhaps this is partly because Krasznahorkai at once encourages the reader not to look for the typical trappings of a novel within its pages. It is, after all, called A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East.
The book’s main character is a grandson of Prince Genji, the titular character of what may be the world’s oldest novel, the Japanese Tale of Genji. The young prince has travelled to an abandoned monastery near Kyoto in search of a garden that may not exist. While Genji is the foremost human character, the real protagonist of the book is the monastery itself. Krasznahorkai tells the story of the monastery’s constituent parts, from the wooden logs that took decades to choose (each arranged according to which side of a mountain it had grown on), to the exquisite grace of the temple’s carved Buddha (who averts his gaze from ‘this wretched world’). There may be very few characters in the book but there are many stories; Krasznahorkai has achieved the difficult task of evoking a compelling world without drama, plot, or action.
Part of this is achieved through the captivating quality of Krasznahorkai’s prose. His notoriously long sentences take a little getting used to, but they soon carry us along like a gentle river; they rise and fall, circle back on themselves, attain a rhythmic quality that induces a trance-like state, beautifully broken at the end of chapters with a sudden image: a dog curling up to die beside a gingko tree, a bird disappearing into the sky:
For that song lasted only a single minute. When it stopped, the little bird ascended suddenly into the sky along a straight line, then, tracing the form of a few rising and falling ellipses it was gone, ascending into the distance, so high up that there was no eye that could have been capable of discerning that tiny spot, that tiny point, like the tip of a needle growing ever smaller in the shimmering distance of the azure-blue firmament.
The eye’s failure in this excerpt suggests one of Krasznahorkai’s broader themes, the limits of human perception and understanding, especially of history and nature. Much of A Mountain to the North suggests a meaning to things beyond human ken, although perhaps it is not a question of meaning; this sensation of unknowing may be what Krasznahorkai wants to evoke.
… eight enormous trees grew … with a message spreading among their roots, in their straight trunks, and the fine lacework of their foliage, a message in their story and their existence, a message which no one shall ever understand – for its comprehension was, very visibly, not intended for human beings.
Reading this book often felt like observing an object of delicate beauty, a fine latticework or porcelain. Without story or character such a state would be difficult to maintain for the length of a full novel, but it is on account of these absences that the book manages a sense of strange peace. Despite Krasznahorkai’s relentless verbiage there is a quietness to the book, a sense that we are looking into a place outside of people, outside of the concerns of the everyday.
When Genji first arrives at the town near the monastery, he does not see a single person and wonders if the inhabitants left on account of ‘some kind of problem’. The book’s final chapter returns to the town – although now Genji too is gone – and reveals that the town is empty owing to ‘some kind of great problem somewhere’. Not much of an explanation, perhaps, but its precise nature lying outside of our understanding strengthens a creeping suspicion that builds throughout the book: Genji may be travelling through a kind of peaceful apocalypse after all.
With its focus on natural beauty and ingenious but ultimately flawed human attempts to master the world, A Mountain to the North may be a climate change novel. It is sad in its visions of faded lives – both human and animal – but fittingly peaceful as well, a meditation upon how our world may feel when there is nobody left to live in it.
László Krasznahorkai translated by Ottilie Mulzet A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East Profile Books 2023 HB 144pp $29.99
Ben Ford Smith is an Adelaide-based writer and the co-author of Drugs, Guns & Lies (2020, Allen & Unwin). He holds a PhD in creative writing from Flinders University, South Australia.
You can buy A Mountain to the North from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW.
You can also check if it is available from Newtown Library.
If you’d like to help keep the Newtown Review of Books a free and independent site for book reviews, please consider making a donation. Your support is greatly appreciated.
