Year In Reading contributor Scott Esposito interviewed László Krasznahorkai’s translator Ottilie Mulzet. Among the topics they discuss is Seiobo There Below, Krasznahorkai’s most recent novel. It will be published this spring.
This is absolutely a New Directions book, and we think those of you who’ve fallen in love with Javier Marías or Roberto Bolaño or László Krasznahorkai as much as we did will agree. Wholeheartedly.
New Directions really knows how to make a book sound enticing!
This is a milieu that, for every Don Delillo (whose apocalypse-mastery is undeniable), produces several Jonathan Franzens or Chad Harbachs – conservative stylists whose technical gifts are harnessed to a kind of domestic realism, which eschews metaphysical or existential flights in favour of pragmatic, reader-friendly observation. It is a kind of triangulation between the demands of the critics and the market that feels, to many, less ambitious and confrontational than the work being made elsewhere in the world.
This is why, every so often, the city’s twentysomething literary crowd falls in love with a foreign writer, who for a period becomes a sort of talisman, a sign that their aspirations go higher than the current domestic-realist model will allow.
Hari Kunzru on László Krasznahorkai’s growing popularity.
![“A writer doesn’t need anything to write a book, he is completely alone and it’s good that it should be so. A director on the other hand can’t make a film without others.”
- László Krasznahorkai
[Image via]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3r719A1uv1r6xvfko1_400.jpg)
“A writer doesn’t need anything to write a book, he is completely alone and it’s good that it should be so. A director on the other hand can’t make a film without others.”
[Image via]
![“I write my texts, my sentences, in my head — outside there is a terrible, almost unbearable noise, inside there is a terrible, almost unbearable, pounding silence.”
- László Krasznahorkai
[Image via bluebanana.ch]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3r6rsU2fX1r6xvfko1_1280.jpg)
“I write my texts, my sentences, in my head — outside there is a terrible, almost unbearable noise, inside there is a terrible, almost unbearable, pounding silence.”
[Image via bluebanana.ch]
