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Hard cover, 8vo, in rainbow colored foil covered boards, 308 pp. CONDITION: Fine, as new. Issued without dust jacket, now in a mylar protector. A collection of twenty-one interconnected short stories (vignettes, really,) by the Hungarian author Krasnahorkai, also 2025 Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. This book was short-listed for the Mann Booker International Prize in 2018. Many of the stories had been published individually. ** An unnamed traveler, a modern Everyman, perhaps, such as created in the medieval morality plays, is catapulted from the modern world, (situated initially somewhere in Germany,) through time and space in these prose poems. The narrator explores the limits of his philosophical malaise, literally propelling him from West to East, on a philosophical journey. Nietzsche's breakdown in Turin, for instance, is dramatically interpreted through the oracular presence of figures such as Thomas Mann, Dr. Mobius, and Immanuel Kant in one scene. [See our items numbers 9005 and 8347 for versions of "Everyman."] While later, an "ascetic prince of philosophers," (sounding like Bouddha,) is explored for 2500 years of the promise of enlightenment through the negation of desire and suffering. Later still, the author riffs on trying to research the first Russian astronauts in space of the 1940's and 50's, in the author's home country of Hungary, meeting with impenetrable obstacles of understanding as to his seemingly obsessive desire to research this particular topic of Cold War history, which he explains as prerequisite to leaving earth...all time being perceived as the preparation for the next stage and as consequence of the past. The narrator's state of mind, being treated in the Budapest Institute by Dr. Hyem, in "That Gagarin" circles us back somehow to Nietzsche's philosophical sensitivities and mental distress. How do you adequately describe this except as art? (AMJ)
Ref: LITLAZ 9692
$40.00