In Our current condition of displacement, says L?szl? Krasznahorkai in One begins a Krasznahorkai story like a free diver, with a deep inhalation before plunging in. His fiction is not faithful to literary convention, but it is faithful to life. The extended periods of quiescence, the isolated glimpses of the sublime, the portentous images signifying nothing, the mundane images signifying everything, the arbitrary eruptions of horror and beautythough Krasznahorkais technique relies upon artifice, the result is an honest, courageous, often harrowing portrait of a civilization in drift and decline