The Melancholy of Resistance
Saturday, November 18th, 2006 @ 02:09
by László Krasznahorkai (1989)
From the backcover:
A circus, promising to display the stuffed body of the largest whale in the whole world, arrives in the dead of winter, prompting bizarre rumors. Word spreads that the circus folk have a sinister purpose in mind, and the frightened citizens cling to any manifestation of order they can find—music, cosmology, fascism.
Written in long sentences and slow pace of early novels, peppered with conscious quotes of ostentatious cliché sentences, with archetypal characters such as the chintzy widow Mrs Plauf, her son, the dreamy, hopelessly naive Valuska whom she refuses to speak to, the iron-fisted Mrs Ezster, and her disenchanted, cynical, weak husband Mr Gregory Ezster, The Melancholy of Resistance gives a universal anarchic vision with rich, surrealistic layers.
The Melancholy—and perhaps I should add, the futility—of Resistance is a pessimistic, at the same time funny, novel, and behind all the cynical absurdism, also heart-wrenching.
I would also highly recommend Werckmeister Harmonies, the movie rendition by Béla Tarr. (In fact, I’d recommend almost all of Tarr’s works.)
