Destruction and Sorrow beneath the Heavens

Destruction and Sorrow beneath the Heavens: Reportage
by László Krasznahorkai, Ottilie Mulzet (Translation)
Jacob Russell‘s reviewFeb 15, 2021  ·  edit

I have just come to the last page of Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s Destruction and sorrow beneath the Heavens. What does it mean, to say that This is a great book? It left me in tears, with the feeling that all books… poems… works of art, are the same… the same, by their very difference. This is a book to read as you set out to write a poem, or make a painting, at the end of the world… a poem no one will survive to read a painting, no one will survive to see.

This is not a report of traveling through Southeast China. This is not about searching for the lost classical culture of Imperial China. This is a fable. An extended fable. A journey through labyrinth of questions, that are all the same question–all leading to … bird songs, tea…emptyness, and back to the beginning.

“A way a one a last a loved along the riverrun.”

There is always a way out of Suzhou… and before us, in the thick fog, supposedly there is somewhere: Jinhuashan.