@fiction is this a suitable forum to discuss about genres of comedy ??

I want to work on a pastoral stories for a Donjon&Dragon 5 Obojima setting.

I wonder if anyone of you have a text/book recommendation on how Miyazaki writes his stories ?

Or just some pointers on how you would do it

For almost a decade in the Anglophone world, comment on the unravelling of reality has become commonplace. See Brexit, Trump 1.0 and 2.0, pandemic, Trump 2024-, the surge in domestic terrorism, internet addiction, AI hallucination, and so on. “Post-truth” has, arguably, arrived hand-in-hand with state violence and social decay. Those who feel we have all literally or figuratively slipped onto the “wrong timeline” may think of their own familiar televisions as Tse describes a news anchor appearing onscreen with her usual smile absent, and instead of announcing the news: weeping.

When Tse finished writing City Like Water, it was 2020, the year after Hong Kong’s massive protests and the subsequent crackdown. City Like Water will arrive in publication in English translation at a time when the world is growing weirder still. Darker still. Chaos is deepening, and hope is a slippery fish. Now is a good time for a City Like Water.

I just finished this book after a breathless three days, and wow, it was a doozy. Warning, MASSIVE spoilers ahead, and this is a book that definitely should not be spoiled. All of the tension and interesting details would float away without being anchored by the slowly growing awareness of what is happening.

I'm not much of a 'reviewer' of books. I love reading them but mostly place them back on the shelf until I want to relive the events again. Thus be warned, this isn't going to be a treasure trove of insight, but much more along the lines of a longer blurb piquing the interest in the book.

Wed 31 Dec 2025 10.00 CET

In a 1924 letter to André Gide, Thomas Mann said he would soon be sending along a copy of his new novel, The Magic Mountain. “But I assure you that I do not in the least expect you to read it,” he wrote. “It is a highly problematical and ‘German’ work, and of such monstrous dimensions that I know perfectly well it won’t do for the rest of Europe.”

Morten Høi Jensen’s approachable and informative study of The Magic Mountain positions Mann as a writer who was contradictory to his core: an artist who dressed and behaved like a businessman; a homosexual in a conventional marriage with six children; an upstanding burgher obsessed with death and corruption. Very much the kind of man who would send someone a book and tell them not to read it.

Despite the doubts Mann expressed to Gide, The Magic Mountain – a very strange, very long novel – was embraced throughout Europe, and three years later in America, too. Its publisher there ignored the strangeness and proclaimed its “use value … for the practical life of modern man”. While that makes it sound like Jordan Peterson-style cod philosophy, in fact it stands alongside In Search of Lost Time, Ulysses, The Man Without Qualities and To the Lighthouse as one of the summits (apologies) of literary modernism.

The novel describes its youthful protagonist, Hans Castorp, visiting a tuberculosis sanatorium in Davos where his cousin is a patient. Intending to stay a few days, he doesn’t escape for seven years. The novel’s plot mirrored its composition: it was first conceived as a novella, a lighthearted counterpart to the gloomy Death in Venice. But Mann began writing in 1913 and didn’t finish for more than a decade. Between those two points, the first world war radically changed the book’s size, scope and temper because it radically changed the political and moral outlook of its author.

Mann began the war a staunch conservative. Yet by the early 1920s he was making speeches in defence of the maligned Weimar Republic. (In time, and in exile, Mann became the most prominent German opponent of the Third Reich.)

This tumult fed into The Magic Mountain, notably in the characters of Lodovico Settembrini (humanist) and Leo Naphta (rightwing radical), who vie for Castorp’s soul. Their arguments are dazzling – far more so than the political toing and froing Mann engaged in while writing the novel. It isn’t Jensen’s intention, but his dogged account of Mann’s shifting political views supports the theory that a novel can know more than its creator.

Jensen falters occasionally when attempting to correct the record. He says the “oft-repeated claim” that Mann “was an indifferent or cruel parent seems inaccurate”. Yet all he offers in support is a single quote from the autobiography of Thomas’s son Klaus, who was deeply troubled for much of his relatively short life. There is voluminous evidence to the contrary.

Jensen also takes issue with the “callousness” of Ronald Hayman’s assertion, in his 1995 biography, that Mann “liked and admired” his wife but wasn’t in love with her. Hayman supports his claim by quoting from a letter Thomas wrote to his brother on the matter. It’s permissible to takeissue with Hayman’s conclusion, but Jensen’s protest – “How could he possibly know?” – seems disingenuous coming from a writer engaged in the same process of interpretative analysis. Especially in the case of a judgment about Mann (“gay most of the time”, in Colm Tóibín’s description) that is so uncontroversial.

Whatever the truth may be, it doesn’t make The Magic Mountain any less captivating an exploration of the human condition, or less of a literary achievement. Jensen doesn’t penetrate deeply into the mysteries of the book, but he doesn’t aim to do so. Rather, he gives a brisk, confident overview of an extremely dense work of art – no small achievement – and contextualises the era in which it was forged. In his foreword to the novel Mann wrote that “only thoroughness can be truly entertaining”, but summary has its pleasures too.

I do not think it was in the book, rereading the book again (2nd time), because of the series’ changes, or the 1990 Mini-Series (my opinion best visual expression of ‘It’) & much later 2-movies (I disliked both, but keep giving them a try to impress me & they fail).
I liked the series a lot, even with gory bloody scenes (I hate those type of visual entertainment & never scares me, just grosses me out) & main, Kid, character dying, until the following changes that make no sense.
I hate it. Was never necessary,

Plus, I cannot see how ‘It’ can ever be defeated with that huge advantage.
No other character in the series is in Past-Present-Future at exactly the same time.

The Indigenous nation’s idea of using the pieces, of the spaceship-prison, to cage ‘It’ could never work. ‘It’ was only in the cage after the cage was created-when the stupid military General (correct me if I wrong about the character’s rank) freed it, when everyone else exists only in the present. ‘It’ existed when it was not built & after he was freed from the cage, at the very same time, “he was supposed to be caged”, thus ‘It’ was never caged & can never be caged.
Continuing with The Indigenous nation’s idea of using the pieces, of the spaceship-prison, to cage ‘It’, it makes no sense to the script’s/cannot be changed part about all expressions of the story of ‘It’ history, thus is another hugely stupid mistake. Simply, if the cage has existed for centuries before even 1908 (or someone wants to say just 50-years earlier/1858), then how the heck does, in every 27-years, ‘It’ escape? Again, If the answer is he exists in Past-Present-Future, then referencing the previous paragraph, the cage would never work.

Kill the kids when they are being born & feed on the fears of not threatening kids, until next set of threat kids are born, kill them & repeat to end of time. Some would say, the kids that threaten ‘It’ could be born & grow older while ‘It’ is in one or more of the times of 27-years of Hibernation. Remember with the super power of either existing at the same time in Or travels within Past-Present-Future, ‘It’ simply moves to the time when each set of threatening kids are born & takes them-out.

*- The Military General (again, correct me if I wrong about the character’s rank) reasoning to free ‘It’ & actually having it done, is just too unbelievably STUPID to accept. Forget that he also has to convince far too many military personnel below his rank to do it. He would just not be able lie most of the participating people into it. People would figure it out, especially, when destroying one of the pieces & the scientist. Maybe, there are a few certified crazies, but not the rest.

Now, the makers of this series should have simply-
Never had given ‘It’ the possibility to exist in the Past-Present-Future, at the same time or just as like a time traveler
&
Used military construction (maybe, building a underground <like a nuclear missiles [SP?]> facility) accidentally (**not believing the Indigenous Nation people’s telling them not to stealing there land to do it) setting ‘It’ free. Easily Believable, because it happened in IRW USA, many times.

"The Cat Who Tasted Cinnamon Toast" (1969) by Ann Spencer is a delightful and funny high-culture treat for children and adults.

What a lovely book! And how sad it is that I'm almost the only person in the world who seems to remember it. But I read it to my son several times when he was young, so I've done my part to share the memories. I should note that my parents read it to me when I was a toddler!

The book was both written and illustrated by the talented Ann Spencer. It's the story of an elderly millionaire, Miss Margrove, whose cat Augie suddenly goes through a strange transformation: he absolutely refuses to eat cat food. One taste of cinnamon toast, and all is undone; he now insists on only the finest gourmet fare. His psychologist is unable to explain this mysterious change.

Augie is fickle in his tastes, venturing into the haute cuisine of one culture after another. Miss Margrove's stable of chefs eventually lose their tempers and quit. Fortunately an unexpected television appearance by the French Chef, Julia Child, inspires Miss Margrove and saves the day.

The balance between text and art is particularly well done. Each page features large, finely-detailed black and white illustrations. Unusually, there is absolutely no "talking down" to the young reader; words and phrases like "Escoffier", "truite amandine", and "la vie en rose" are sprinkled liberally throughout the text. Nonetheless, the story is quite easy for children to comprehend, and the humor of the words and illustrations is ideal for a child.

I first began reading The Cat Who Tasted Cinnamon Toast to my son when he was about four years old, at a guess. He loved it; it helps that he's a cat-lover (and any child who is a cat-lover is sure to like this book). There are no serious crises, no moments of terror or stress. Augie is naughty at times, but in a very lovable way. It's a perfect bedtime book.

Reading the book aloud takes about half an hour, including the VERY necessary time spent allowing the child to look at each picture. As I noted above, some of the cooking-related language is a bit esoteric; if you're not familiar with the words, you may want to look up pronunciations before reading it aloud. It's definitely worth the effort.

There is one illustration which might trouble some parents. When Augie sneaks out to the Omar Khayyam restaurant to be inducted into the wonders of Persian cuisine, the illustration includes a representation of a fairly large painting on the background wall that depicts a naked woman seated (with legs turned sideways) next to a man. So far, my son has never commented on it, and I see no reason to call it to his attention or be concerned. When I was a child myself, I never noticed it through many readings.

For very strict parents, I suppose the page where Augie gets drunk on baba au rhum could also be a concern. My son found it hysterical. So do I.

If you're reading aloud, a passable Julia Child impersonation adds quite a lot to the experience (she has a short but memorable television appearance in the book). It's also useful to be able to sing the old "Let Your Fingers Do The Walking" jingle from the Yellow Pages commercials in the 1960s and 70s (it's on YouTube now). But neither is a requirement, of course!

The book is out of print forever, I suppose. It represents what might now be considered an impossibly "high culture" moment in America, an aesthetic which I cannot imagine will ever return to public awareness, much less popularity. And that's sad. Still, if you're lucky enough to find a copy, it's a wonderful, memorable book.

I been re-watching ‘Stranger Things’, to prepare to for the show shutting down. Like the show, but it seems almost like a ‘Steven King’ knock off, more so with every sense begun. I also love the original ‘Twilight Zone’ best SciFi stories ever made, better than any TV & Movies ever made. I cannot tell you how many timesI have watched them, but give me $100 each episode I have watched & I would become the richest person in the world. I really liked the original ‘Amazing Stories’ as well. I liked all the remakes of both series that followed.

So, here is my idea-

Create a TV series that takes ‘Steven King’s stories, mostly the books, & makes at least one-entire season out of each of his stories. Maybe, need to increase seasons’ at least 1+-Hr. episodes to at least 20. Maybe, even do more than 1-‘Steven King’ stories at a time, already doing that for other famous authors.

Through a lot of the series there is a woman providing character Lilly Bainbridge comfort & was the daughter of the circus clown, I believe her name was Ingrid Kersh, played by Madeleine Stowe. They tell this character’s story starting with her as a young teen, minimally 10-years old, in the circus with her clown father, back in 1908. Then she is in the present time of the series, kind of confusing, but I know it started in 1958, looking at least 40s, maybe, 50s years old (my mother is watching to, when I brought it to her, she says late 40s). So, she is looking way too young, for minimally how old the character has to be. 1958 - 1908 = 50-years old + she was at youngest 10-years old in 1908 (again my mother agrees with that) = 60-years old. Even if she looks 55-years old, that is at least 5-years too young.

Can someone help explain to me how this makes any sense?

I really liked the series, liked the book better. Rereading the book, after 35-years & being a young HS person, so maybe, that will change.

I tried to read Stephen King several times across the years and I don’t know, it never worked. Tried his short stories, the different genres he wrote, … a bit of everything. It frustrated me a bit because I loved every single adaptation from his work in TV show or movie form.

As I started watching It:Welcome to Derry, I got an itch to give him another chance as I really wanted to get to finally know the whole story behind. And I don’t know what changed, perhaps I got older and my taste changed, but I’m speeding through It and I absolutely love it, I can’t let go of the book!

I’m just surprised how taste can evolve across time. Might give a chance to several authors I never liked when I was younger!

The guy or gal who was never trained and never expected to be getting into the spy business. Perhaps, even when up to their eyeballs in secret codes and fake identities, they’re still clueless as to what they’ve got themselves into. And that makes them relatable because, well, it could be me, or you.

How would I, a regular person, respond if I somehow got caught up in the world of espionage? How would you? The following reading list might offer some clues.

• The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan

• Our Man In Havana by Graham Greene

• The Tailor Of Panama by John le Carré

• The Amateur by Robert Littell

• The Wayward Spy by Susan Ouellette

• The Travelers by Chris Pavone

Excerpt:

Return. Second. Third. Fourth. I get up. Early morning. I go to the bathroom. I urinate. Three hours without being able to sleep. Maybe more. I don’t know. There are no noises in the house. Everyone is sleeping. I open the curtains. Darkness. Moon. There isn’t one. Silence. It’s cold. Silence. There is no one shouting, no one reprimanding, no one saying anything. There are no prohibitions. Silence. Blue hour. I can’t sleep. A car passing sounds in the distance. A siren sounds. Someone must be dying. Maybe someone is going to prison. Maybe someone just wants to turn on their siren. I get up. I go out. I sit. On the stairs. I look through the window. Lights. Street. Garbage truck. Garbage collectors. Only at this hour. It disappears. The truck. Contemplate the tree on the corner. Try to recognize some tree that I climbed as a child. See how everything changes at this hour. I recognize the most important one. It seems like it was in another place, as if it had been another time when I sat on those branches. A dirty tree. A dirty park. I rest my head on the wall. I curl up.

When was the first time I did this? When did I decide to spend the whole night looking out a window? Deep down I am still a scared child. Scared of what? I didn’t know then. Now I do. I am afraid of living with a huge emptiness for the rest of my life. An emptiness created by anxiety that eats me from within. A kind of beast that needs to create to feed itself, and if it doesn’t create, it will eat me alive. I look at the sky again. When did I decide to spend the whole night looking out a window?

Back then I went to sleep very, very early. It wasn’t to be awake at dawn, it wasn’t to look through the window and see dark trees, it wasn’t to try to imagine a different time or place. It was to be awake when no one else was. To be alone. Without anyone who thinks they know what is best for me better than I do. Do I know what is best for me? Now I do. If not, I wouldn’t feel this now.

Freedom.

With the window wide open to see the sky. I close my eyes. I try to sleep. If they find me sleeping here, what will they say? I can’t sleep. I open my eyes. I can see. What was I doing before at these moments? Playing, playing and playing. Hidden in my room. Without making much noise; not after the times I have been hit.

Shit.

Why do I keep thinking about this? Almost everyone I know doesn’t get caught up in these kinds of things. I don’t know anyone who gets caught up in these kinds of things. They go on with their lives without the flu chasing them. Maybe they feel the same as me. Maybe they go through the same thing. Maybe they don’t dare to tell anyone either. Maybe we all try to fool ourselves. I hold my right shoulder. I lean more.

I want to sleep.

Quietly, I played and no one disturbed me. At least until the sun was fully up. It’s part of a process. Feeling like this is part of a process. It has to be that. At some point I will stop sitting on the stairs at dawn. I will sleep. I will wake up. After that, back to school, back to the noise, back to existence, back to being someone, back to being vomited into the world. Silence. Lights. Street. Tree. The love for silence. I sigh.

I want to sleep.

I hope tiredness finally conquers me. I love silence. Other people get uncomfortable when I stay silent. They have to learn to enjoy it. One star. Two stars. Three stars. I don’t see any more. There are never more. The silence during the early mornings was the only thing I considered mine until I lost that too. Maybe I didn’t need it anymore. Why again now? No, it was last year that I started this again. I should have finished already. Where is that child? What happened to him? When did I lose myself? When did I stop being like that? Before I only enjoyed. Why can’t I look outside now like I did before without having to think about something sooner or later? Why do I always have to end up remembering what I used to do or who I was knowing I already stopped doing it or I am no longer like that?

Shit.

At some point, innocence disappeared for some reason or someone. They sent it to hell. Maybe I don’t feel comfortable noticing all the years that have passed and I don’t remember anything important, nothing significant I have done. No, she is important, she means something. My drawings, my creations are important too. It’s this hour that makes me feel like this. I could share this moment with her. No, not this one. Another different one. One in which I don’t feel lost. One in which I don’t lock myself in. I could tell her all this. Would she understand?

I hope so.

It’s a bond I don’t have with her. It’s that special relationship that exists between the first moments of the day and me. It’s sitting on the stairs leaning against the wall and feeling how I have been in this same place at different ages. That’s it. But this sky always reflects the emptiness I have. No, I don’t have emptiness.

What do I have?

Maybe it is the knowledge that I cannot decide what to do with my life. That in truth it never depended on me. Yet still being naive. And thinking I could choose. Reality is very harsh. Why is this society like this? What do I have that is really mine?

I have to create the bond with her. Maybe I am afraid. Knowing that I could have wasted time. But I am with her now. That is not wasted time. It will never be. I keep feeling that I am clinging to a past. Believing that any moment in which I was more innocent is better. That has nothing to do with her anymore. That is a problem I don’t know how to solve.

Believing that being unconscious, being ignorant, realizing only tiny things is the best way of living there is. I think the more I know or understand the worse I feel. Even love disappears. It always disappears. No, this love remains. It stays.

At this hour is when I doubt whether I really love someone or not. But I am thinking of her. If her image doesn’t come to my mind, I don’t care, it is a silly relationship doomed to die; if her image appears, I care. Only her image has appeared at this moment.

–Read more in its original Castilian language at https://fictograma.com/ , an open source Spanish community of writers–

Excerpt:

CHAPTER 41. THE CARD

“Life looks at us wanting to play.”

That’s what the little card said, placed on top of the napkin at Urban Sushi Bar Sibuya that midday. Ever since my work stay in Santiago de Chile in early 2012, I had become addicted to sushi, and now, sitting in front of that plate of perfectly aligned rolls, I couldn’t help thinking that phrase was more than a mere slogan: it was a challenge.

The sushi was arranged like a chessboard: small pieces, each with its own destiny. Salmon, avocado (known as palta in Chile), perfectly pressed rice, juicy ginger. Everything looked ordered, calculated, as if life were showing me that even in chaos there was a secret geometry. Chaos and order. Yin and Yang. Did that balance really exist? Or was the randomness of chaos literally the antithesis of order?

While the waiter set down some sexy curry rolls on the table, I thought that yes, life does play with us. It deals us cards and waits to see which one we’ll pick up. I took the chopsticks with a certain clumsiness, aware that my mind was elsewhere. The restaurant’s card remained in front of me, its phrase still echoing: “Life looks at us wanting to play.” What if the game had already started and I was the only one who didn’t know the rules? What if something similar to what happens in the series Alice in Borderland was taking place?

The phone buzzed on the table, bringing me back to reality. It was a message from Lisette: “don’t be late. Dinner is at nine.” There was no room for negotiation. The invitation had turned into an order disguised as courtesy. I put a roll in my mouth, trying to let the fresh taste of the fish calm me down. But all I felt was the pressure of the cards I had to turn over. Option A was the safety of catching the AVE and disappearing. Option B, the adventure, was facing that dinner which promised to be a minefield of insinuations, memories, and half-truths.

I arrived at the apartment five minutes early. I’ve never liked making people wait, nor being made to wait myself. I learned that from my father too. The Barcelona evening-night air still carried the city’s bustle, and in my hands I carried a bottle of wine I had just bought at Vila Viniteca in L’Illa Diagonal. The place, with its endless shelves and its aroma of wood and cork, had held me captive for a few moments, as if every bottle hid a story waiting to be told.

That was where a young, tall, blonde girl of extremely serene beauty and curious eyes recommended an Argentine Malbec to me. Her voice had the confidence of someone who knows what they’re talking about, and she spoke of the Uco Valley in Mendoza as if she had walked it herself, as if she could describe the sun caressing the vines and the cold wind coming down from the mountains. I listened, fascinated, and in the end I let myself be guided by her instinct. The bottle, with its pale and austere label, bore a name that felt more like an omen than a brand: El Enemigo (The Enemy). I held it carefully, aware that this wine was not just an accompaniment for the evening, but a symbol, a silent guest bringing its own mystery. As I climbed the stairs to the apartment, I thought that perhaps the name carried a warning, or maybe an irony: what enemy could be hiding in a wine that promised intensity and character?

I didn’t even have to knock. The door opened the moment I approached. Lisette greeted me with that smile that was never completely sincere: a gesture that seemed kind but always concealed a hint of calculation. She hugged me quickly and gave me a kiss that ran down my spine. She wore a tight black silk dress with a V-neckline that revealed just enough to spark the imagination. The light fabric, with its subtle sheen, slid over her skin like a second layer, marking every movement with natural grace. Matching it were high black heels that clicked firmly, almost hypnotically, against the floor as she walked. Long silver earrings swayed gently with each gesture, drawing the eye to her neck. On her wrist, a minimal bracelet—just a metallic glint that contrasted with the sobriety of the dress.

The clothes were not just an outfit: they were a statement. Every fold, every shimmer, every detail was arranged as part of the game that had begun with this dinner.

“Nice choice,” she said when she saw the bottle. “Though the name is a little unsettling, don’t you think?”

She took my hand and led me through the hallway of realities toward the living room.

The table had been set with almost theatrical precision. Two candles burned, plates arranged symmetrically, and a brand-new-looking linen tablecloth. Everything spoke of a dinner planned down to the smallest detail, as if every object had a role in the play about to unfold. She let the wine rest in the center, its pale label illuminated by the warm candlelight. El Enemigo seemed to watch us, like a third guest waiting for its turn to speak.

“Dinner for two?” I managed to say. “And the girls?”

Her gaze fixed on me, steady, as if searching for an answer beyond the obvious.

“Architect, this dinner is to thank you for everything you’ve done—and still do—for me. The girls went out tonight. It’s just you and me.” She paused. “Do you need anyone else?”

In that moment I understood this wouldn’t be a simple dinner. It was a board. And I, without having chosen it, was already in the game. The game had begun, and the phrase echoed again in my head: “Life looks at us wanting to play.”

We sat in the old chairs that had watched over that dining room since day one. The cork came out with a soft pop, and the aroma of the Malbec filled the air. We filled our glasses; the dark liquid slid smoothly, its purple reflection in the candlelight like a shared secret.

“The enemy…” she repeated, caressing the label with her fingertips. “Sometimes names hide truths we’d rather not say out loud.”

Her gaze settled on me, steady, with a glint that was anything but accidental. The silence grew thick, and when she handed me my glass her fingers lingered longer than necessary. A touch that burned like a spark.

“Let’s toast,” she said softly, almost in a whisper. “To enemies who become allies… or excellent lovers. Have you come to declare war on me?”

The glasses clinked gently, the sound like a shared heartbeat. She held my gaze while she drank, and the movement of her throat as she swallowed the wine was hypnotic. Lisette settled back in her chair, crossing her legs with deliberate slowness. The dress slid just a fraction, revealing a flash of skin.

“You know, some battles are worth fighting,” I said, entering her game. If we were going to play, we might as well play. Besides, since my “confinement” in Madrid I hadn’t been with a woman. Lisette had been the last.

“Reward?” she smiled, toying with the rim of her glass. “I’m curious to know what you expect to win.”

“Maybe it’s not about winning, but about losing… losing track of time, losing control.”

“That sounds dangerous.” She leaned forward, letting her perfume envelop me. “Though… sometimes the forbidden is what attracts us most.”

“And what we enjoy most. Like this wine: intense, dark, with a taste that lingers on the lips,” I said before taking another sip of the Argentine wine.

“Are you talking about the wine… or about me?” Lisette murmured.

The silence that followed spoke louder than words. The candles flickered, as if keeping time with the quickening scene.

“By the way,” she said with a mischievous smile, “you say losing control can be a pleasure… want me to prove it?”

“Maybe you already are. Every gesture of yours is a calculated move… and I’m falling right into your game.”

“Game?” Her fingers traced the edge of the table, moving toward my hand. “I don’t like rules. I prefer high stakes… where the risk is as great as the desire.”

The brush of her skin against mine lasted only an instant, but it was enough to make my pulse race. The dress shifted with every movement, revealing more than it concealed. The dining room was suddenly very, very warm.

“Then let’s toast to risk. To what begins with a wine and ends… who knows where.”“Perhaps in a place where words are no longer necessary,” Lisette...

--Read more in its original Castilian language at fictograma.com, an open source Spanish community of writers--

Excerpt in English (the short story is in Spanish):

Did you know that everything makes a sound? Yes, everything.When they locked us all up because of a virus, I was alone for a long time, a very long time. In that time I discovered something: everything makes a sound. The first few months I tried to endure the solitude; there’s no person immune to loneliness, some just tolerate it better, but in the end they feel the same as all the other lonely people. With time I started talking to myself, then living on the internet, until I cut it off completely...

-Read in original text in the following url-

Fictograma is an open-source platform that serves to extend the reach of Spanish-language writers to the world.

Más allá de la Nada

En el vasto manto estrellado, el vacío comenzó a desgarrarse. Como una herida abierta en el tejido del cosmos, una grieta palpitante se extendía lentamente, destilando un fulgor eléctrico de rayos y sombras. No era simple oscuridad: lo que se agitaba allí dentro era más profundo que el mismo vacío estelar, un abismo que negaba la existencia.

—Advertencia: brecha hiperespacial en la cercanía. Se recomienda retirada —entonó la voz metálica de la IA, fría e imperturbable.

Frente a la grieta, la nave de Shin flotaba inmóvil, mientras el gran dragón desplegaba sus alas descomunales. Con un rugido gutural se lanzó contra la fisura, exhalando un fuego oscuro y púrpura que lamía los bordes desgarrados del cielo. Las llamas se aferraban al vacío como si intentaran suturar aquella llaga cósmica

László Krasznahorkai is only the second Hungarian to be awarded the Nobel prize in literature. He follows Imre Kertész (1929–2016), whose best-known book outside Hungary is Fatelessness – an account based on the author’s experience as a teenage prisoner in Auschwitz. When the fifteen-year-old protagonist is liberated and returns home, he finds that nobody truly understands what has happened. Words have become detached from their meaning.

Fatelessness was written at some point in the 1960s, but it could not be published until 1975, and it received its first English translation in 1992. The Nobel prize would come a decade later. By then, Kertész’s writing had changed. The clear, open prose of his early book had been replaced by a closer, denser form of writing.

Krasznahorkai’s own first book, Satantango (1985) – which he assumed to be his last – was published when he was thirty-one. It was a great success in its first German translation, in 1990, but it was his next full novel, The Melancholy of Resistance (1989), that won the Bestenliste prize in Germany and that was his first to appear in English (in 1998, in my translation).

As well as in Germany, Krasznahorkai was launched, in a small way, in England and the US. The Melancholy of Resistance received very good but generally very short reviews, and the author developed a reputation among what used to be referred to as “discriminating readers”. War and War followed in 1999 (2006 in English, in my translation), and it was not until 2012 that Satantango appeared in English (also in my translation). This was Krasznahorkai’s miracle moment, when the floodgates of praise opened up in the anglophone world – a moment akin to the “discovery” of Austerlitz in 2001, the year of W. G. Sebald’s death. As with Sebald, the commendations were led by Susan Sontag and James Wood.

Sebald had, in fact, written the blurb for my translation of The Melancholy of Resistance:

This is a book about a world into which the Leviathan has returned. The universality of its vision rivals that of Gogol’s Dead Souls and far surpasses all the lesser concerns of contemporary writing.

Sebald and Krasznahorkai, both central Europeans of mid-century vintage, share a melancholy vision of the world, verging on despair. I introduced them to each other at the University of East Anglia shortly after the original publication of The Melancholy of Resistance, when Krasznahorkai came to take part in a series of readings and conversations. His English was halting at the time, and we found ourselves developing an almost comic dialogue in terms of timing. Few people comment on the sense of humour in his books, but it is certainly there. (The same goes for Sebald, if to a lesser degree.)

Krasznahorkai’s world is one of flowing words, endless sentences, endless paragraphs. Sometimes a single sentence might be enough. Pages flow gradually into each other in a continuum, the intricacy and momentum of the prose all but overwhelming us in its slow advance, like lava creeping over a landscape. Satantango was published in the dying years of the Soviet empire, when everything was austere and corrupt and seemed to be on its last legs. To comprehend this, to capture it, was a mammoth task. Krasznahorkai’s main Hungarian contemporaries, Péter Nádas (b. 1942) and Péter Eszterházy (1950–2016) had their own ways – Nádas through the amplification of memory and experience, Eszterházy through playful postmodernist adventures with language. Absurdity, instability and despair haunt the central European consciousness of the twentieth century, and Krasznahorkai’s provincial world is plunged deeply into it.

Satantango is set among the community of a dying co-operative farm in a backwards society left without hope or entertainment. There is only the pub where the drunken tango of the title takes place. The Melancholy of Resistance unfolds in a similar milieu, but in a small town rather than a village. The monstrous power of authoritarianism is set against the monstrous power of anarchy and destruction in the form of the enormous dead whale that goes on show in the town’s main square. War and War, by contrast, opens in a decaying city. A curator discovers a mystical text that takes him first to a chaotic and dangerous New York, then to Cologne, then Switzerland, in search of the meaning of the manuscript. Things do not end well.

By the time of War and War’s appearance in English, Krasznahorkai had become closely linked with the Hungarian film director Béla Tarr, his exact contemporary. The pair have so far collaborated on a sequence of seven films that includes Sátántangó (1994), Werckmeister Harmonies (2000; adapted from The Melancholy of Resistance) and The Turin Horse (2011). The films, like the books, have developed a cult following. Often long, patient, austere and beautiful, shot in black-and-white, they complement the novels’ style and pacing. Tarr’s Sátántangó runs to more than seven hours. Werckmeister Harmonies, although it dispenses with a large chunk of the book on which it is based, still occupies close to 150 minutes. Krasznahorkai and Tarr have formed, as Sebald might have put it, a joint leviathan.

The legacies of Dostoevsky, Gogol and Kafka, along with Robert Walser and Thomas Bernhard, stalk the historical and psychological territory from which Krasznahorkai has emerged with his own original, gigantic, idiosyncratic constructions. The slow, remorseless disintegration of self, society and the physical body of the universe is his major theme, as seen not just in the novels, but in his novellas, short stories and miscellaneous writings, including Animalinside (2010; 2011 in English) The Last Wolf (2009; 2016), The Bill (2010; 2013) and many more. All inhabit the same realm, at an advanced stage of collapse. It was for this reason Sontag dubbed Krasznahorkai “the master of the apocalypse”.

Nevertheless, there is in both War and War and many of the later books an attempt to find a secret world of order. It is there in the mysterious text read by the archivist in War and War; and it can even be discerned in Melancholy’s Eszter, the music scholar who searches for perfect natural tuning in an untuned world. In a conversation following the anglophone publication of Satantango, shortly after which, out of exhaustion, I stopped translating Krasznahorkai’s longer work and his current main translator, Ottilie Mulzet, took over, I asked him, “Where next?” He said he wanted to write a book without human characters at all.

An attempt to envision a more harmonious schematic world, all but stripped of humans, had already been made in 2003, in A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East, which finally appeared in English in 2022. (It was while I was in the middle of translating this book that I handed over the reins to the remarkable Mulzet, hence the delay.) Set in Japan, it is Krasznahorkai’s most serene work, focusing on the garden of a monastery in Kyoto. Here, too, there are ugly disruptions, in the form of various animal deaths, but the prose constantly reaches deep into the subsoil and out towards eternity.

Seiobo There Below (2008; 2013), set variously between Japan, Spain, Athens and medieval Florence, continues the quest for perfection, taking the form of a series of stories that follow various artists as they pursue their craft. Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming (2016; 2019) takes us back to Hungary. Here, our protagonist, the Baron, buries himself, like Eszter in The Melancholy of Resistance, in an obscure field of study – mosses – hoping to detach himself from the world. Herscht 07769 (2021; 2024), the author’s most recent novel to appear in English, is more of an adventure, involving a criminal obsessed with Bach. It unfolds over one enormous sentence. A new novel, Zsömle odavan (2024), has yet to appear in translation.

Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming did not just mark a return to Hungary, but to the author’s presiding themes and obsessions. In his words: “With this novel I can prove that I really wrote just one book in my life. This is the book – Satantango, Melancholy, War and War, and Baron. This is my one book”. This “one” book presents a vision of the world as corrupted and doomed, as it rolls towards its inevitable destruction. Yet there is an undeniable majesty in the way it goes about this. It is for this majesty, I suspect, that László Krasznahorkai has been awarded the Nobel prize.

George Szirtes is a poet and translator. His most recent book of poems is Fresh Out of the Sky, 2021.