Looking for a summer read? Our editors are here to discuss some of what they’ve been reading lately, which range from German theology to QR code-studded Hungarian novellas. Read on to learn more!
László Krasznahorkai’s latest novella, Chasing Homer, is an experience. Translated from the Hungarian by John Batki and published by New Directions, the novella includes an original score by Miklós Szilveszter and images by Max Neumann. The music, accessed by QR codes at the start of each chapter, offers an anxious and propulsive accompaniment to Krasznahorkai’s virtuosic sentences: soundscape as panic attack. The plot follows a paranoid and unnamed narrator fleeing unknown killers—or, parable that it is, perhaps his, and our, mortality—in short bursts of manic interiority. The music, prose, and Neumann’s images, which have echoes of Edvard Munch’s moody lithographs, combine to pull the reader along as spectators to a timeless chase and maybe even as sympathetic fellow prey.
–Kent Kosack, Director of the Educational Arm
It feels perhaps timely to be reading the Letters and Papers from Prison by German priest and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer now. In them you feel his isolation and his longing for connection, and as hope of a swift trial gives way to a long stay, you see the brave façade he presents to his parents, urging them not to worry about him, while at the same time his personal notes reveal his growing despair and suffering in prison. But he also speculates on what he calls “the world come of age”: the retreat of any metaphysical notion of God in the face of the advances of philosophy, humanism and science. He does not fight against this world: it is not, as he says, “an occasion for polemics or apologetics”, even if he does, to a certain degree, set Christ against religion. His plea instead is to place God at the center of life, to see the resurrection not in terms of something that comes after death, a metaphysical passage to a beyond, but rather as a rebirth or reawakening into an awareness of this very world in which we are. The world he describes in the banality of prison life, the bird singing during the half hour of outdoor exercise he gets, his pleasure in morsels of food sent by his parents, the terror in the cells as the bombs begin to fall on Berlin. But the center of life also encompasses all the things he cannot say in these letters: his part in the resistance and the plot against Hitler, the brutal and sudden execution that we as readers know awaits him, but which he cannot see; and it is there in the collection of these letters by their main recipient, Eberhard Bethge, and their translation and publication into this book that I read as I sit here alone in my room and watch the rain fall, the clouds part and the sun shine down onto the garden where I have planted seeds, and where they begin to germinate and grow, their cells and proteins unfolding, reaching up towards the sun with a promise of blossom and fruit, of consumption and decay, all happening here, now, at the center of life.
–Liam Sprod, Copy Editor
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