Herscht 07769 by László Krasznahorkai

Published in 2021 (though not until ‘25 in English, after his Nobel), Krasznahorkai was relenting on his pledge never to pen another novel. Perhaps the great doom-monger had been tempted out of silence by the pandemic?

The format is a single 406-page sentence which darts between perspectives as it zigzags around a central temporal line. Knowing this and that the underpinning of both style and subject matter was particle physics, I was concerned that it would read like one of those smart-arsey American postmodern novels.

Nada que ver. A lightness remains even as the material darkens. I tried to recall when I was last so eagerly devouring a narrative like this. Krasznahorkai has avoided all the tricks of the genre writer (short chapters, cliffhangers etc) only to fashion an elemental impetus, reminiscent of how I’d find myself compulsively turning the pages of Bolaño’s tomes with the nagging suspicion that this shouldn’t really be happening.

The protagonist is Florian, revealed as a gentle giant embarking on a seemingly unrequited correspondence with Angela Merkel. He has been plucked from an orphanage by ‘The Boss’, a Neo Nazi gruppenführer with a Bach obsession. Florian will come to share this, indeed this music will become his ‘state of being’, but his initial fixation has come as a result of attending evening classes with a local scientist. We are left to ponder just how big an idiot Florian might be, but as he posts his letters to Berlin, it also seems he might be something of a savant: a half-wit whose wit is half full, not half-empty.

Existence is a surplus, an excess, a mistake which might be corrected at any moment, Florian advises Merkel. As he becomes gripped by this absolute dread, the people of made-up town Kana in Thuringia become beset with a dread of a far more creeping kind. The fancied cosmic apocalypse is replaced in reality by a piecemeal combination of human, social and natural decay (all part of the same phenom for Krasznahorkai) against which we are equally impotent....beyond ringing up information hotlines.

Nationalisms require desacralising...

Nationalism is almost never an unalloyed positive force. Just as the structures it seeks to supplant (typically 'empires') were never an unalloyed negative force. 

This is as true in the Middle East — Zionism, Arab and Kurdish nationalisms etc — as elsewhere. History is never a simplistic morality play in spite of concerted efforts in the contemporary world to portray it as such. 

The most obvious flaw in most expressions of nationalism is how easily it becomes a piggyback prop for more mean spirited and ultimately extremist modes of thought.

In the case of Arab Nationalism it is easy to trace the pattern, from resistance to both long-standing Ottoman domination and the European interference of the early twentieth century to a set of ideals that had been distorted by exposure to militant Islamism, itself a religious impulse contaminated by twentieth century secular western totalitarianism. 

The end result is a form of nationalism which regards Arab sovereignty as inextricably Islamic sovereignty, constitutionally unable to share or even properly coexist with non-Islamic peoples and their own national aspirations. The deeper history of Arab presence in the Levant is one of conquest and colonialism, yet modern Arab nationalism not only denies this, it turns this denial into something SACRED. 

And therewith issues which need to be pondered carefully when not picked apart, compromises always on the table, become matters of almost childlike commitment and obstinacy.