by The Booker Tea

Herscht 07769

In concrete terms, though, Krasznahorkai’s work offers, to a degree rare in contemporary life, one of the central pleasures of fiction: an encounter with the otherness of other people. — Garth Risk Hallberg, The New York Times

Cover image for Herscht 07769

by László Krasznahorkai (Hungary)
Paperback ISBN: 9780811231534
416 pages

Gentle giant Florian Herscht is an orphan, adopted by a neo-Nazi who has apprenticed him as a graffiti cleaner. The Boss, a Bach fanatic, is enraged that someone is spraying wolf emblems across the monuments to the famed composer in their East German town. He is determined to punish the culprit, and Florian has no choice but to join his gang as they devise a plan to catch him. But Florian has bigger things to worry about: having attended Herr Köhler’s adult education classes in physics, he can see that the world might end at any moment.

Written in one cascading sentence with the power of atomic particles colliding, Krasznahorkai’s novel is a tour de force, a moving character study, a blistering satire and devastating encapsulation of our helplessness at the moral and environmental dilemmas we face today.

About the author

László Krasznahorkai (born 1954) is a Hungarian novelist known for formally daring, philosophically charged fiction. He has lived and worked internationally, and his essays and interviews have appeared alongside his novels. He received major international recognition, including the Man Booker International Prize (2015) and the U.S. National Book Award for Translated Literature (2019).

About the translator

Ottilie Mulzet is a literary translator of Hungarian poetry and prose whose work has been recognized with several major literary awards.

Buy this book via your neighborhood English bookstore in Germany.