Review:
http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/pageviews/2013/09/the-devil-is-in-the-details-of-lászló-krasznahorkai's-seiobo-there-below
BY: JEVA LANGE
László Krasznahorkai might just be the greatest author you've never heard of.
Yes, it's a bold claim, especially considering the numberless international novels that have yet to receive English translations. However, thanks to New Directions, Krasznahorkai's 2008 novel "Seiobo There Below" is due to hit American shelves later this month (it's on Kindle now), translated from its native Hungarian.
While Krasznahorkai's "Satantango" won the Best Translated Book award in 2012, the author regretfully remains off many reader's radars. In fact, "Satantango" is more likely to refer to Bela Tarr's seven-hour epic film adaptation by the same name. While many of Krasznahorkai's works are better known through cinema (the great Hungarian director Tarr devoted decades to various adaptations of Krasznahorkai's works), "Seiobo There Below" will likely never be included: Tarr announced his retirement following his 2011 film, "The Turin Horse."
Perhaps Tarr's films are so striking because of their faith to Krasznahorkai's signature style: the director's long takes mirror the author's impossibly long sentences ("Seiobo There Below," it should be credited, finds itself in the expert hands of translator Ottilie Mulzet, who also brought Krasznahorkai's "Animalinside" to English via New Directions in 2011). Because of the structure, "Seiobo There Below" poses a challenge to quote, but allow the attempt: "…For in reality [the crane] never existed in time moving forwards or backwards — it is granted the artist's powers of observation, so that it may represent that which adjusts the axes of the place and the things in this ghostly city, so that it may represent the ungraspable, the inconceivable — as it is unreal — in other words: unbearable beauty." It is a gorgeous passage, representing the briefest thought in a novel where sentences can run on for many pages.
Those lucky enough to be familiar with Krasznahorkai's work will recognize the breathless prose as nothing new from the author. His obsession with detail and process recalls Melville's prose, while the page-long sentences bring to mind the stream-of-conscious modernism of Joyce or Faulkner. But there is a kind of damp, earthy darkness all of Krasznahorkai's own that makes it hard to pin down an easy comparison. As a result, "Seiobo There Below" is not simple to read; it is often enormously dense, complex and difficult. But Krasznahorkai rewards patience generously: one example, a chapter called "Distant Mandate," regarding a visit to the Alhambra, is an unmistakable masterpiece. In it, a guest wanders corridors and courtyards, dizzied by the infinities of the tiles and columns and pathways. In admiring the Alhambra's mathematical impossibilities, this visitor thus becomes a sacrifice — consumed. Magnificently, Krasznahorkai assures that his audience is similarly devoured. The chapter is a brilliant exercise of language — as near a visual art as literature could possibly be.
Unlike "Seiobo There Below's" predecessors "Satantango" and "The Melancholy of Resistance," which hold firm, historical settings, "Seiobo" is looser, jumping east and west, divorcing itself from a standardized time period. Each of the 17 chapters, numbered one to 2,584, offers a separate narrative although, as their Fibonacci-sequenced titling implies, the chapters build on each other thematically. The uniting factor is the creation of art, be that restoration, painting, a work of architecture or a costume. All are reflected upon with deep religiosity.
While Christian and Buddhist traditions dominate, Beauty is ultimately the ruling deity in "Seiobo There Below." In "Christo Morto," a painting is "REALLY AND TRULY" inhabited by Christ, down to its actual animation. The titular Seiobo is a goddess herself, who puts down her crown to "leave the boundless plains of the Sky, the Radiant Empire of Light," summoned by a Japanese noh performance "there below." All the while Krasznahorkai gives emphasis to art's creation, its attribution and its observation by an audience. At one point, there is even a debate between youths as to whether "Guns of Brixton" is better performed by The Clash or Arcade Fire.
And yet, art and religion are never entirely divided. Even when the meeting of the East and West results in misunderstanding (interestingly, but unsurprisingly, Seiobo herself is the dichotomous eastern "Queen Mother of the West"), art is connected back to the incomprehensible power behind human and godly inspiration. When it's remarking on this spirituality, "Seiobo There Below" might seem a tonal departure for "the contemporary Hungarian master of the apocalypse," as Susan Sontag once dubbed Krasznahorkai. However, "Seiobo" is never without a sense of utter finality and inevitability, especially in its conclusion. This is the writing of the melancholic and the bleak. These stories are not without death.
Just as with a solely topical approach to visual art, one gains nothing by reading "Seiobo" on the surface. It is only "below" that the reader discovers the satanic counterpart to the godliness of beauty. Although it is not immediately apparent in "Seiobo There Below," Krasznahorkai has in fact written another novel of the underworld — this one as puzzling, as dark, and as infinitely complex as his best works to date.
Funmi Tofowomo Okelola
-The Art of Living and Impermanence
