Author(s): László Krasznahorkai

Novel | Translated fiction | Hungary | New York | New Directions

Spadework for a Palace bears the subtitle "Entering the Madness of Others" and offers an epigraph: "Reality is no obstacle." Indeed. This high-octane obsessive rant vaults over all obstacles, fueled by the idées fixes of a "gray little librarian" with fallen arches whose name--mr herman melvill--is merely one of the coincidences binding him to his lodestar Herman Melville ("I too resided on East 26th Street...I, too, had worked for a while at the Customs Office"), which itself is just one aspect of his also being "constantly conscious of his connectedness" to Lebbeus Woods, to the rock that is Manhattan, to the "drunkard Cowley" and his Lunar Caustic, to Bartok. And with this consciousness of connection he is not only gaining true knowledge of Melville but also tracing the paths to "a Serene Paradise of Knowledge." Driven to save that palace (a higher library he also serves), he loses his job and his wife leaves him, but "people must be told the truth" THERE IS NO DUALISM IN EXISTENCE. And his dream, in fact, will be "realized, for I am not giving up: I am merely a day-laborer, a spade-worker on this dream, a herman melvill, a librarian from the lending desk, currently an inmate at Bellevue, but at the same time--may I say this?--actually a Keeper of the Palace."

"Krasznahorkai establishes his own rules and rides a wave of exhilarating energy. Apocalyptic, visionary, and mad, it flies off the page and stays lodged intractably wherever it lands." -- Publishers Weekly
"One of the most important-and eccentric-writers working today." -- Hari Kunzru - The Spectator

"Realty is no obstacle," reads the epigraph to our Book of the Week, Spadework for a Palace: Entering the madness of others by László Krasznahorkai (translated by John Batki), a single, book-length, wonderfully hysterical sentence pouring from the mind of a seemingly unremarkable librarian obsessed with his near-namesake Herman Melville, with the psychogeography of their shared part of New York, and with his dream of building a Permanently Closed Library that would isolate and protect his selective version of the world from the realities and that would otherwise dissolve it.  
>>A box built in the abyss.
>>Krasznahorkai on the trail of Melville. 
>>Archive fever. 
>>The narrator becomes obsessed with the apocalyptic architecture of Lebbeus Woods... 

Author Biography: The winner of the 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature and the 2015 Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement, Laszlo Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, Hungary. John Batki is a kilimologist, writer, translator, and visual artist. He was born in Hungary and has lived in the United States since age fourteen.