Seiobo There Below [Paperback]

Seiobo  a Japanese goddess  has a peach tree in her garden that blossoms once every three thousand years: its fruit brings immortality. InNear-infinite sentences in a nonlinear narrative shuttling across time and space, linked only by occasional appearances from a Japanese goddess? It sounds daunting, I realize. Yet the amazing thing aboutKrasznahorkai is an expert with the complexity of human obsessions. Each of his books feel like an event, a revelation, andL?szl? Kraznahorkai has given us a work that shimmers under a prism of hidden meanings. Our task is to connect the dots, experience the mystery of the text, and embrace moments of bewilderment with patience, openness, and preparation for a deeply meaningful encounter.Krasznahorkais erudition is staggering, but the way he relates the choosing of the wood for the shrine, or the restoration of a canvas, is so attentive and so modest that is sidesteps pedantry entirely, and instead participates in the very concentration it describes. The chapters are numbered according to the Fibonacci sequence, in which each number is the sum of the two before it, and indeed,Tinged both with sadness and an anxiety about the capability of language, this brilliantly ambitious novel, like the tragic poetry of one of its characters, becomes a 'ravishing cadenza.'Those lucky enough to be familiar with Krasznahorkais work will recognize the breathless prose as nothing new from the author. His obsession with detail and process recalls Melvilles prose, while the page-long sentences bring to mind the stream-of-conscious modernism of Joyce or Faulkner. But there is a kind of damp, earthy darkness all of Krasznahorkais own that makes it hard to pin down an easy comparison. As a result,