Service
4.390 kr.What’s this book about? Is there a restroom? Do you have gluten-free bagels? Do you work here? Do you have a restroom? Do I buy books or rent books or what?
Still a bookseller in his late forties, Sean knows that the worst thing about a bookshop is the customers. Then there’s the gift-wrapping, the invoicing, the Yelp reviews. The overwhelming sense of self-loathing after another day of not writing a novel yourself.
While Sean’s book remains unfinished, his city has changed around him. As have friends and acquaintances, at least the ones who keep in touch. The service industry is different, too. But what, or whom, is he serving anyway?
Biting, hilarious and self-aware, John Tottenham’s debut novel is a razor-sharp dissection of gentrification, friendship, jealousy and the role of literature in a digital age.
The World Goes On
3.690 kr.A Hungarian interpreter obsessed with waterfalls, at the edge of the abyss in his own mind, wanders the chaotic streets of Shanghai. A traveller, reeling from the sights and sounds of Varanasi, encounters a giant of a man on the banks of the Ganges ranting on the nature of a single drop of water. A child labourer in a Portuguese marble quarry wanders off from work one day into a surreal realm utterly alien from his daily toils.
In The World Goes On , a narrator first speaks directly, tells twenty-one unforgettable stories, then bids farewell (‘ for here I would leave this earth and these stars, because I would take nothing with me ‘). As László Krasznahorkai himself explains: ‘Each text is about drawing our attention away from this world, speeding our body toward annihilation, and immersing ourselves in a current of thought or a narrative…’
Satantango
3.690 kr.In the darkening embers of a Communist utopia, life in a desolate Hungarian town has come to a virtual standstill. Flies buzz, spiders weave, water drips and animals root desultorily in the barnyard of a collective farm.
But when the charismatic Irimias – long-thought dead – returns, the villagers fall under his spell. Irimias sets about swindling the villagers out of a fortune that might allow them to escape the emptiness and futility of their existence. He soon attains a messianic aura as he plays on the fears of the townsfolk and a series of increasingly brutal events unfold.
The Last Wolf & Herman
3.490 kr.In The Last Wolf, a philosophy professor is mistakenly hired to write the true tale of the last wolf of Extremadura, a barren stretch of Spain. His miserable experience is narrated in a single, rolling sentence to a patently bored bartender in a dreary Berlin bar.
In Herman, a master trapper is asked to clear a forest’s last ‘noxious beasts.’ Herman begins with great zeal, although in time he switches sides, deciding to track entirely new game… In Herman II, the same events are related from the perspective of strange visitors to the region, a group of hyper-sexualised aristocrats who interrupt their orgies to pitch in with the manhunt of poor Herman…
These intense, perfect novellas, full of Krasznhorkai’s signature sense of foreboding and dark irony, are perfect examples of his craft.
