Chasing Homer by Laszlo Krasznahorkai

I lost this book somewhere after finishing it. It's an appropriate fate, maybe. The narrator of Laszlo Krasznahorkai's Chasing Homer is constantly trying to disappear. We know nothing about him, not his name or nationality or age; all we know is that he's being chased. We don't know who's chasing him; he doesn't even seem to know who's chasing him, or even what they look like. He only knows that if they find him, they will kill him brutally. It seems beside the point to ask whether these pursuers are real, because it's a question with no relevance to the fear and panic that are the subject of the book. The narrator can't even stop to determine whether they are real. He must keep moving at all times. Time narrows; for him there is only the present moment, and the self narrows too, down to its barest and most animal elements.

The narrator moves vaguely south through Europe. He boards ferries that travel along the Adriatic coast. (It's not hard to imagine him moving due southwest from Krasznahorkai's native Hungary.) On one such ferry, he overhears a local berating a Japanese tourist couple about visiting a beautiful and secluded island. The local whips out a copy of The Odyssey and begins reading. This island, we quickly intuit, is supposedly the island of Calypso, where Odysseus himself was waylaid for years before his final push home to Ithaca. The narrator decides desperately to make his way there, imagining that Calypso's island might be his last chance to shake his pursuers. There's a funny reversal here. For Odysseus, Calypso's island was a trap, a distraction that kept him from getting home, but the narrator of Chasing Homer has no home. To be eternally waylaid, suspended, is the best he can imagine. The island represents, perhaps, the pause in the plot, the interruption of the forward motion of events that leads inexorably to death.

I thought this was fine. It struck me as very Beckett. It's the kind of book that seeks to capture a very singular feeling, and it does that very well. It eschews the realistic-literary belief that feelings should be incarnated in specific stories. At the same time, like the best of the "brodernist" writers, it winks at genre fiction tropes that have already become a little outdated. Chasing Homer is a kind of thriller, pared down to its barest essence--just as the narrator is pared down to his barest essence. It's a multimedia project that's interspersed with illustrations by artist Max Neumann. These illustrations are sketchy and flat, made of half-erased pencil lines and fields of thick black that capture the novel's reduction of the human. It's accompanied, too, by a music score by Miklos Szilveszter accessed by QR code that I haven't listened to because I lost the book. I thought the illustrations were also fine.