Book of the Week: ENOUGH ABOUT ANGELS: The Nobel Lecture by László Krasznahorkai
There could be no more suitable Nobel laureate for the end of the world than László Krasznahorkai, whose astounding, frequently book-length sentences trace human thought’s struggle against the forces that would ultimately erase it. Although poised always on some sort of cultural event-horizon, Krasznahorkai’s books verbally resist the pull towards annihilation posed by the infinite gravity of social, political, historical, environmental and purely existential impossibilities, and provide glimmers of human authenticity in an increasingly depersonalising world. Pulling a dark literary thread backwards through Bernhard to Kafka, Krasznahorkai’s books have a profoundly hypnotic effect, shot with moments of beauty, exhilaration and clarity.
Krasznahorkai’s Nobel Lecture, now available as a small book, typically undermines our understanding of a world we actually fail to understand: in these strange times what we took to be angels are wingless and mute; what we took to be towers are only so because of the slope of the ground; what we took to be failure, incapacity and misfortune are in fact the springboard for existential rebellion.