Small jobs for a palace
by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, translated from Hungarian by Joëlle Dufeuilly
Cambourakis, 112 p., €16
Anyone who has never read Laszlo Krasznahorkai, a Hungarian writer born in 1954 and one of the greatest living prose writers, can start with Small jobs for a palace. In short, to the point of resembling a short story, this text differs from the author’s previous, prodigiously profuse novels: The Melancholy of Resistance, War and war, Seiobo descended to earthor even Baron Wenckheim is back.
In the New York library
Small jobs for a palacewhich will also delight connoisseurs, seems less dark than the writings cited, while bearing the same pessimistic view of human nature which is heading towards its doom. The present volume was born from a snub: Krasznahorkai was once hosted in residence at the New York Public Library. There he defied the conventions linked to his creative work on site, producing a wandering logbook: The Manhattan Project (2017, untranslated).
The following year, the writer took his three New York obsessions – the seditious architect Lebbeus Woods as well as the literary giants Herman Melville and Malcolm Lowry – and stuffed them into the skull of a neurotic narrator. This one, in a single sentence which approaches a hundred pages, therefore endorses this trifunctional passion, but also nourishes a project made hilarious by the grace of a writing playing with mastery on the comic force: transforming the Public Library of New York, of which he is an obscure employee, as a mausoleum of the book closed on itself and forbidden to the slightest visitor. Yes to conservation, no to communication!
The genius of language
As unlending as the ant in the fable, this narrator presents himself under a predestined identity but which he records in tiny letters, « herman melvill »as if to emphasize its grayish smallness. He tirelessly dreams of an ideal library, with 53 million books, but which “stands there, like an inaccessible treasure, since it is precisely by remaining at a distance that it preserves its wealth and remains ready to defend its value at any moment. »
Laszlo Krasznahorkai, with his genius for language and his old alarmist background, goes into spirals and irresistible variations on healthy marginality or the refusal of standardized work, while an authorized madness unfolds without restraint: that specific to our species. We emerge from such reading unrecognizable to ourselves. This is how literature is made and does.
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