The Storyteller Who Offers No Escape

To an innocent bystander, The World Goes On might seem a bland title for a story collection, suggestive of heartwarming tales about good, simple people enduring life’s hardships with grit and courage. Seasoned Krasznahorkaians, however, will understand that the title should be read in a tone of mocking, even deranged, sarcasm, followed by a mirthless snort and a forceful expectoration. In László Krasznahorkai’s fiction the world never goes on. It is always ending. Or, as Krasznahorkai might write, the world is always ending, bursting into flames, collapsing into itself, exploding, tearing apart, disintegrating, being devoured by nothingness.

This sensibility is announced in the opening lines of the first story, which bears one of Krasznahorkai’s proudly obscurantist titles, “Wandering-Standing”:

I have to leave this place, because this is not where anyone can be, or where it would be worthwhile to remain, because this is the place—with its intolerable, cold, sad, bleak and deadly weight—from where I must escape …

This note echoes through the”; “nothing whatsoever exists at all”; “the hope that he would die some day.”