World Goes On

Shortlisted for The Man Booker International Prize 2018 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 Laszlo 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...` The World Goes On is another masterpiece by the winner of the 2015 Man Booker International Prize. `The excitement of his writing,` Adam Thirlwell proclaimed in the New York Review of Books, `is that he has come up with his own original forms-there is nothing else like it in contemporary literature.`