Commentary |

on Chasing Homer, a novel by László Krasznahorkai, translated from the Hungarian by John Batki

What is the genre, let alone the medium, of László Krasznahorkai’s Chasing Homer? This masterful translation from the Hungarian is categorized by its publisher as a work of fiction, yet the volume includes QR codes between chapters that link to percussion interludes by the jazz composer and performer Miklos Szilveszter. As a result, the reader’s experience of the fast-moving book’s 19 sections is more like that of a rhythmic podcast, or perhaps more exactly, a dreamlike film with accompanying score. Stark illustrations by German artist Max Neumann (with whom the author previously collaborated) provide only the sparest of visual suggestions regarding the main character’s psyche; all that really comes across is his chilling lack of identity.

Nevertheless, given that Krasznahorkai has written a number of screenplays for the filmmaker Béla Tarr, cinematic comparison seems apt. Chasing Homer, in fact, could also be described as televisual. Certainly the paranoid and dystopian aspects of the story correspond to offerings now available for streaming (the first season of Mr. Robot comes to mind). Joyce, Beckett and Kafka provide the obvious points of reference. But there’s also an element of experimental theater in Neumann’s eerily evocative paintings, Szilveszter’s heart-pounding, and Krasznahorkai’s disturbing illogic — something of Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysteric Theater or Tadeusz Kantor’s Cricot 2. If any of this sounds excessively avant-garde, it should be added that Chasing Homer is as immediate, and almost as engrossing, as binge-watching.

“Killers are on my trail,” the first section begins, following just behind Szilveszter’s ominous drum introduction. To which the nameless first-person narrator adds, with hilariously black effect, “and not swans, of course not swans, I’ve no idea why I said swans … that’s what jumped out, so that’s what I keep saying to myself, killers not swans.” Persecution-induced insanity and existential angst take alternately frightening and comic turns in Krasznahorkai’s panicked sentences, with justifiable terror or mad delusion possible explanations for his character’s absurdist ranting: “The decisions I make must be the utterly wrong ones, always, without exception, that’s how I can confound my pursuers … only chaotic movements, accidental decisions, only helter-skelter sudden, unexpected, unplanned moves that run counter to all logic can save me.”

Szilveszter’s speeding drum rhythms reflect the fugitive’s sense of flight, a constant need to improvise and shift tempo. For the pursued, time itself has lost its ability to be measured: I can imagine that it’s only moments ago that they handed down my sentence.” Or “I’m a prisoner of the instant, and I rush into this instant, an instant that has no continuation, just as it has no continuation, just as it has no earlier version.” This complements a certain disorientation in regards to location, his “fate to be on the roads.” “I’ve no idea what country this is, as far as I’m concerned it could be any country,” declares the narrator. I confess that many of the named Adriatic locales (Pola, Mljet, Split, Zara, Rovinj) were for me unplaceable without Googling. This could hardly have been the author’s intention for his European audience, of course, yet my own geographic ignorance provoked a nagging sense of real-world horrors in hard-to-pronounce places of which America remains mostly unaware.

Readers of even the best translations encounter elements of unfamiliarity; there’s always some sense of cultural alienation in foreign work. And a quality of linguistic distance does remain in Chasing Homer. John Batki’s contemporary rendering of the book’s opening sections nevertheless channels the chilling brilliance of an intelligent yet hallucinating homeless person. The use of expletives (“life isn’t worth a handful of crap”) in particular feels true to experience (“you said it, man”), a paranoia which Batki captures with its concomitant plausibility and absurdity. As one example, there’s a funny extended riff (really an extended rant) about the stupidity of the mouse, whose life is compared to the bloated and well-fed tourist; the laboratory animal’s life is “a luxury cruise.” Or here’s Krasznahorkai’s schtick ridiculously applied to yet another creature:

“… Just look at that deer, that little shit, it’s time you realize that she’s not the gentle little Bambi of children’s stories, that’s ridiculous, no, this actual little fawn hates everyone … this hypocritical beast, to tell you the truth, bites, but that’s not why I brought her up, that this little shit bites, but because when you chase her, she won’t take the trouble to escape but instead, thinks better of it, and after a few leaps and bounds, lies low to wait and see if she will squeak by …”

This clearly unbalanced character speaks in crazy yet apparently pragmatic terms. “When you stand there paralyzed and stinking, doused with gasoline,” he proposes, “and see the flame of that lighter getting closer and closer, and when you still just manage to feel yourself being slightly lifted by the propulsive force of the explosion, only to have your small body spatter into tiny fragments before it’s consumed, go ahead and try querying then about such things as: what is life.”

Yet there are moments when Krasznahorkai seems to toy (though wryly) with bitter political philosophy: “Sheltered places are the most dangerous,” for they “tend to increase your fear, the fear of unknown perils outside … making you incapable of drawing conclusions, or rather making you draw mistaken conclusions about what’s really taking place outside.” And …

“The good isn’t a moral category, the good is that deceptive condition that makes you easily recognizable, simplifying you and and rendering you defenseless, for the good lulls you and dulls you … being in the good suggest that you have nothing more to do … being in the good deludes you into believing that the case is over for you.”

Something more than literal practicality may be detected in the assertion that what is required for survival is an affected banality, saying “something while saying nothing at the same time.” As in political life (or as with Krasznahorkai’s haphazard use of italics) choosing a route or making a decision can sometimes only be explained as “just because.”

By the book’s fifth section, Szilveszter’s score portrays the threatening mechanisms looming outside the narrator’s control. Traditional drums give way to metallic jaw-like tearing sounds that suggest instruments of torture heard through steel or cinder-block walls. The racket is also like that of a ship’s hold next to the engine room, “where the roar of the engines obliterates all other sounds.” Timpani slide into Peking-Opera cymbals, bending gongs and ear-splitting Chladni plates. These somewhat obscure instruments produce vibrations that make sound nodes visible as pattern in sand settled on their surfaces. So, too, the fugitive must perceive the form of crowds, employing skills analogous to those of an attentive listener following music: “You must be constantly aware, as in a swirling whirlpool, of the crowd’s inner structure, where it’s denser and where its weave is looser … and if it thickens, be aware when it’s sucking you in, and be mindful when it’s pushing you out … sensing from the slightest vibrations of its structure when to shift your place.”

Even the most attentive reader will have no idea who Chasing Homer’s narrator might be (save for a comical excursus on the uselessness of his university studies) until well into the book’s second half. Up to that point, the chased man has successfully avoided identifying his nationality or defining his “own flight in terms of what it means that they’re after my life.” Purpose, after all, is “the result of the raging of particles carried along by processes determined by chance.” But with all his advice on how to evade detection and capture from “your murderers” (“do not fall asleep”; “you’re not supposed to eat”; “you must keep everything that’s good far away from yourself”), who does the narrator think he’s talking to?

“I’ll explain it — yes, I am speaking to myself, as always, as if I’m speaking to someone, even though I never speak to anyone, only to myself, carrying on my permanent dialogue with myself, now a dialogue that can survive me.”

As readers of this surviving dialogue, are we companions or are we followers? The reader could be said to be as much in active pursuit as in flight, each page turning as mercilessly as a heavy-metal gallop.

In any case, when our weary traveler moves from land to boats, something happens. As he works his way down the Croatian coastline, negotiating strange ports and passengers, this tarrying mortal” undergoes what could only be described as a change of heart and a move towards hope.” After he debarks and wanders through a darkening village, Krasznahorkai’s sentences relax and expand into unexpected fortune’s twilight music: “The moon … peeks out from among fleeing clouds, suddenly casting its clear light on the town just when I need it to get my bearings.” Here another voice is introduced; in the village cafe a “tall, gray-haired old man” tries to talk a pair of Japanese tourists into visiting the “matchless wildlife preserve” of a nearby island. He reads to them from The Odyssey —Tell of the storm-tossed man, O Muse” — attempting to convince them that the island’s grotto is that of Homer’s Calypso. The local guide, “exulting at each dactyl and spondee,” beats the epic lines’ rhythms with his finger on the pages “tamtamtamtamaram, tamtamtamtam.” He also emphasizes that that Calypso’s island is both unsettled and unvisited at this time of year, an overheard fact that our Homeric anti-hero immediately recognizes as a possible place of refuge.

As a drum-accompanied telling of tales, Krasznahorkai’s work is highly experimental yet profoundly traditional. Even in translation, his lyrical sentences manifest the rhythms of thought and emotion. An unexpected stylistic lightness, for example, rises with the main character’s liberation from the “crushing pressure” of being on the run:

“Whatever wind remains is just a breeze, keeping everything afloat, me on my feet, the earth underfoot, the sky overhead, as well as the trees, and the silent sea crows that perch floating on the branches, but also each and every blade of grass, so that everything in existence is floating, and now evening’s falling again.”

This weightlessness is not only newfound freedom from fear but also recognition that “it’s good that I know how to believe in something again.” This makes for quite a reversal, a complete contradiction of the character’s pessimism about the idea of a Higher Power. Perhaps hitting spiritual bottom and desperate conversion to prayer “invoking Zeus and Athena and all of the Gods in Heaven” as well as promises to “partake in the holy rites“ and “chant the sacred words” had their effect after all. Or maybe not. Although there lingers a residual sense of divine intervention (just as Athena looked after The Odyssey’s wily hero), the book has two subtitles: While the second is Odysseus’s Cave, the first is Good luck, and nothing else. Perhaps it doesn’t make any difference whether a journey is directed by Fate or Fortune.

How does the story end? Does the first-person narrator survive? I will only say that the book concludes with a literal cliffhanger, as well as Szilveszter’s final percussive flourish. But ever since the proverbial Garden of Eden, the temptations of knowledge have been too great to refuse. Accordingly, the complex and predetermined path of the literary thriller relies on the reader’s obsessive need to find out. And so perhaps Chasing Homer’s best joke is the author’s very first one. In his terse epigraph, just before the relentless drums and sentences begin to unfold, the diabolical Krasznahorkai posits his irresistible dare: You don’t want to know.

 

 [Published by New Directions on November 7, 2021, 96 pages, $19.95 hardcover]

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.