The modernists understood the paradox of the society from which they emerged. Europe, to them, was both new and old, traditional and progressive, and modernist art, too, would be innovative and fresh, yet preoccupied with decay and decline. In the English-speaking world, modernist writing would eventually itself experience the death with which it was obsessed, but in central Europe, strangely, this never happened. Modernism continued to flourish in the last century, spurred on by successive cycles of revolution and tyranny.
László Krasznahorkai is very much of this tradition, writing books that are innovative to a fault, and liveliest when envisioning death. Born in Hungary in 1954, less than a decade after the end of the Nazi occupation his Jewish father survived, he began writing in the 80s as communism collapsed. The decomposition of the body politic may be his central preoccupation, and all his novels are imbued with a premonition of the end of things. Susan Sontag, an early reader, anointed Krasznahorkai “the contemporary master of the apocalypse”.
Herscht 07769 is accordingly bleak from start to finish. It opens with the almost comically on-brand words “hope is a mistake” (the novel’s epigraph) and closes with a line that warns of “merciless night descending heavily upon the land”. In between lies another morbid tale of social, even cosmic, fragmentation. There’s a certain monotony here, instilled by the novel’s one-sentence form, but also by what is now starting to feel like the author’s one-track mind.
Herscht 07769 is set in the fictional town of Kana in the deprived eastern German province of Thuringia, before the pandemic. Florian Herscht is a failed baker who gets taken on by a cleaning company. But the company, as managed by its Bach-obsessed linchpin known only as the Boss, also doubles as a neo-Nazi gang, and Herscht, ever the village idiot, gets mixed up in its dodgy doings.
There are a number of politically resonant puns here. “ALLES WIRD REIN, ALL WILL BE CLEAN,” is the Boss’s slogan. “Rein” in German means not only “clean” but “pure”, and we are to understand racial overtones in the Boss’s efforts to clean up Kana after the outbreak of a mysterious campaign of graffiti. Herscht’s name, too, means “rule” or “dominate” – a joke, because it’s something the completely dependent Herscht decidedly cannot do. He is a Forrest Gump-like figure, innocent and decent in his core, but at the mercy of sinister forces, sociopolitical and celestial.
For Krasznahorkai, society’s disintegration is ineluctable, a fact of cosmology. Attending extramural classes in physics at a local college, Herscht becomes fixated by the matter-antimatter asymmetry problem. This is the conundrum that the big bang created an equal amount of matter and antimatter, yet the sums as physicists observe them today don’t add up: a divine accounting error that Herscht believes spells the end of the world. He writes a series of letters to Angela Merkel, hoping the scientifically trained chancellor will do something about it. These unanswered prayers have a dark, Beckettian humour.
The quantum trope is now so often invoked by European modernist writers that it’s worth reflecting on why. They have, I think, located in the history of the cosmos what their literary forebears found in the history of Europe: origins ancient, but in the process of terminal decay. This is critical to Krasznahorkai’s vision. The quantum understanding of time and space is also something, as the physics teacher tells Herscht, “that could not be reconciled with common sense”. This has obvious resonance for a writer averse to narrative convention.
Krasznahorkai’s particular aversion is to writing in complete, sequential sentences. Containing the entire plot in a single sentence has the effect of compressing time, as if all events are simultaneously juxtaposed, clause by clause. It is what his sometime translator, the poet George Szirtes, has called “a slow lava flow of narrative, a vast black river of type”. Krasznahorkai is in awe of the full stop, the doomsday of punctuation, and that last, end-stopped line – when the viscous text, the lava, hardens to a halt – has a profound finality to it. (“God will make the last dot,” Krasznahorkai has enigmatically stated.)
I wonder, however, if that much-vaunted mastery of the apocalypse has waned. In Krasznahorkai’s earlier novels, the end times were a sensation evoked through cryptic powers of suggestion, symbolism and prose-rhythm. It wasn’t what the novels were about, at least not explicitly. The Melancholy of Resistance (1989) had nothing about the universe imploding. There was only the vast, rotting carcass of a whale surreally exhibited in a provincial ghost town. That, paradoxically, felt much more apocalyptic, more bone-chilling, than all the quantum eschatology here spelled out in great scientific detail. It’s worth remembering, then, what Krasznahorkai once understood so well: novels, like nightmares, are stirred by fears, not facts.
• Herscht 07769 by László Krasznahorkai is translated by Ottilie Mulzet and published by Profile (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
