The World Goes On

by Laszlo Krasznahorkai

George Szirtes (Translator), Ottilie Mulzet (Translator), and John Batki (Translator)

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In The World Goes On, a narrator first speaks directly, then tells eleven unforgettable stories, and then bids farewell (“for here I would leave this earth and these stars, because I would take nothing with me”). As László Krasznahoraki 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…” A Hungarian interpreter obsessed with waterfalls, at the edge of the abyss in his own mind, wanders the chaotic streets of Shanghai. A traveler, 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 laborer in a Portuguese marble quarry wanders off from work one day into a surreal realm utterly alien from his daily toils. The World Goes On is another amazing masterpiece by the winner of the 2015 Man Booker International Prize. “The excitement of his writing,” Adam Thirwell proclaimed in the New York Review of Books, “is that he has come up with this own original forms—there is nothing else like it in contemporary literature.”
  • ISBN10 0811224198
  • ISBN13 9780811224192
  • Publish Date 5 December 2017 (first published 2 November 2017)
  • Publish Status Active
  • Publish Country US
  • Imprint New Directions Publishing Corporation
  • Format Hardcover
  • Pages 288
  • Language English