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by László Krasznahorkai
The National Book Award winner's breathtaking new novel about neo-Nazis, particle physics, and Johann Sebastian Bach.
The gentle giant Florian Herscht has a problem: having faithfully attended Herr Köhler's adult education classes in physics, he is convinced that disaster is imminent. And so, he embarks upon a one-sided correspondence with Chancellor Angela Merkel, to convince her of the danger of the complete destruction of all physical matter. Otherwise, he works for the Boss (the head of a local neo-Nazi gang), who has taken him under his wing and gotten him work as a graffiti cleaner and also a one-room apartment in the small eastern German town of Kana. The Boss is enraged by a graffiti artist who, with wolf emblems, is defacing all the various monuments to Johann Sebastian Bach in Thuringia. A Bach fanatic and director of an amateur orchestra, he is determined to catch the culprit with the help of his gang, and Florian has no choice but to join the chase. The situation becomes even more frightening, and havoc ensues, when real wolves are sighted in the area…
Written in one cascading sentence with the power of atomic particles colliding, Krasznahorkai's novel is a tour de force, a morality play, a blistering satire, a devastating encapsulation of our helplessness when confronted with the moral and environmental dilemmas we face.
"Krasznahorkai's brilliantly cacophonous novel, which conveys the sense that the end is already here, and that the trappings of civilization are easier to scrape away than paint from stone. This stands with Krasznahorkai's best work." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Krasznahorkai's latest postmodern experiment explores small-town discontents in post-unification eastern Germany. Brilliant, like all of Krasznahorkai's books―and just as challenging, though well worth the effort required." ―Kirkus Reviews
"Krasznahorkai has come up with his own forms. There is nothing else like it in contemporary literature." ―The New York Review of Books
"The universality of Krasznahorkai's vision rivals that of Gogol's Dead Souls and far surpasses allthe lesser concerns of contemporary writing." ―W. G. Sebald
"The contemporary Hungarian master of the apocalypse." ―Susan Sontag
This information about Herscht 07769 was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
The winner of the 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature and the 2015 Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement, László Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, Hungary.
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