A Review of A Mountain to the North, A Lake to the South, Paths to the West, A River to the East

László Krasznahorkai’s novels are hard to put down, but not for the usual reasons. The Hungarian writer’s fictions are allegorical in flavor but hostile to interpretation, dense with uneasy images and mad characters, and often indifferent to linear time. Krasznahorkai writes very long sentences: they go on for pages, they feint and double back, they abuse themselves like a trapped animal who chews through its cage and then, in a fit of madness, eats itself. In effect, they tie a reader’s hands behind their back. Krasznahorkai is interested in the mind’s derangements, and as his sentences map his characters’ fugitive thoughts, they recruit the reader into similar patterns of thinking. When you open one of his novels, it can be a shock to see no ragged margins, just a sheer bank of language, inexorable as a funeral stela. But once you proceed down the winding path of a character’s obsessive thoughts, you have no choice but to read on with a similar compulsion.

In A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East—the latest of Krasznahorkai’s novels to be published in English, in a translation by Ottilie Mulzet from New Directions—his sentences turn away from the psyche to trace a character’s journey through a puzzling geography. The novel begins with a man arriving at a monastery outside Kyoto. This man is known only as the grandson of Prince Genji. He has read a book called One Hundred Beautiful Gardens, a mysterious illustrated volume that fell into his hands by accident. The most exquisite garden in this book  is the one-hundredth garden, which is perplexing in its modest beauty, impossible to find, and perhaps a joke inserted by the author. The grandson of Prince Genji suspects the garden is somewhere in this monastery, and so he roams the complex in search of it.

What follows is a meticulous consideration of the monastery and its hidden corners. Each crooked gate and hidden courtyard, each fountain, wall, and tree, each gust of air is evidence of the subtle and unrepeatable chain of events that occasioned its existence. The torii are not just gates but physical histories of the hinoki grove that supplied their timber, of the workers who felled the trees, and of the master carpenter who joined them. The monastery’s library is a time line...