Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s The Melancholy of Resistance

Laszlo Krasznahorkai’sThe Melancholy of Resistance lives in that grotesque realm between the real and the fantastic, its humor is only offset by its profound despair and deeply unsettling disturbance of our place not only in society but in the universe itself. In the first section of the novel we meet Mrs Plauf, an older woman who has been visiting friends and loved ones but is now on a return train trip to her own home town. Most of the action is from her pov, and we listen to her as she lives through a particularly trying voyage. Her sense of reality takes a sharp turn into the sinister when she discovers a man who is staring at here perversely. A young man, but also one who is filthy and seems ludicrously interested in her as a sexual object. As the trip goes on we find out about her life back home…