To Hell With the End of the World

In a 2018 interview with the Paris Review, László Krasznahorkai, the recent winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, claimed to have finished writing novels. A peculiar thing, then, coming out of retirement on a long flat note, with a Kenny G-esque stunt performance of windy and pointless proportion. Herscht 07769, written after the end of his novel-writing career, is remarkable in this regard at least: It manages to snuff out the dark, rich atmosphere of his earliest works in garrulous vapor, thus fulfilling with an ironic vacuity their ominous presaging of annihilation. While Satantango oozed through the page, threatening to suffocate the reader with a sludgy texture also darkly gleaming and gorgeous, the incessant gum flapping in Herscht fails to stir the senses.