Reviews

"... it is the central condition of this mesmerizing, fatiguing, astonishing, bewildering work, a condition in which events lose virtually all connection with what one blenches to call "the story," becoming instead impulses for any and every kind of disquisition and theorizing. Szentkuthy, who liked to think of his writing as resembling nature, surely intended the analogy in terms not only of form (a luxuriant forest) but also of process, of phrases & sentences as genes giving rise to whole paragraphs, whose phrases and sentences might give rise to more. Through a genetic process, therefore, the text becomes plump. The plot, one might say if there were a plot, thickens. This does not come about by drawing on the past to plump up the present by providing motives and causes. What engenders the richness is not deep time, as perhaps in Proust, but rather the layering and interweaving of materials that may be quite tangential, even seemingly irrelevant, to the narrative - again, such as it is. - Paul Griffiths, TLS