Herscht 07769 by László Krasznahorkai

Herscht 07769

László Krasznahorkai, Ottilie Mulzet

New Directions Publishing · Print & ebook · September 24, 2024

A Fiction pick for readers exploring Herscht 07769.

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Genres
Literary Fiction, Satire, Political Fiction
Published
New Directions Publishing, September 24, 2024

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About this book

A WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK OF 2024 A PUBLISHERS WEEKY BEST BOOK OF 2024 The gentle giant Florian Herscht has a problem: having faithfully attended Herr Köhler’s adult education classes in physics, he is convinced that disaster is imminent. And so, he embarks upon a one-sided correspondence with Chancellor Angela Merkel, to convince her of the danger of the complete destruction of all physical matter.

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Otherwise, he works for the Boss (the head of a local neo-Nazi gang), who has taken him under his wing and gotten him work as a graffiti cleaner and also a one-room apartment in the small eastern German town of Kana. The Boss is enraged by a graffiti artist who, with wolf emblems, is defacing all the various monuments to Johann Sebastian Bach in Thuringia. A Bach fanatic and director of an amateur orchestra, he is determined to catch the culprit with the help of his gang, and Florian has no choice but to join the chase. The situation becomes even more frightening, and havoc ensues, when real wolves are sighted in the area… Written in one cascading sentence with the power of atomic particles colliding, Krasznahorkai’s novel is a tour de force, a morality play, a blistering satire, a devastating encapsulation of our helplessness when confronted with the moral and environmental dilemmas we face.

Why This Clicks

Come here for

  • a Fiction pick with literary gravity
  • a sustained, immersive read

Expect

  • warm, reflective tone
  • more atmosphere than explanation

Where it sits

Satire60%
Literary Fiction58%
Political Fiction34%

Percentages are BookFrontier’s reading of the book.

Publisher categories

  • Absurdist Fiction
  • Nature Fiction
  • Hungarian Fiction
Authors
László Krasznahorkai, Ottilie Mulzet
Publisher
New Directions Publishing
Published
September 24, 2024
Format
Print & ebook
Reading lane
Absurdist Fiction