THE MANHATTAN PROJECT by László Krasznahorkai

I regularly put "László Krasznahorkai" into the search box on the Amazon website since I'm so anxious to keep up with Mr. Krasznahorkai's work . . . and so I had some pretty good advance notice that The Manhattan Project would be coming out. Which was, of course, very exciting . . . but with some reservations. For one thing, it was going to be an expensive book: list price $40, and only a 5% discount via Amazon. For another thing, it was listed as being only 96 pages long. For one more thing, it was to be published by Sylph Editions, and while they may well be fine people, I have not been happy with the previous books I have purchased from them: "The Bill" & "Animalinside," both of which were Krasznahorkai books, and both of which were very short (32 and 40 pages, respectively) and pretty expensive (around $14 each, as I recall), and they looked like they were just cheap little things . . . not fancy dancy at all.

So I didn't immediately put The Manhattan Project into my Amazon cart. I did start looking at the LFPL website regularly, though, hoping that they would order a copy and I could latch onto it before the queue formed. When the dice failed to appear month after month, I sent an interlibrary loan request in. They'd come through for me on some other pretty rare stuff, so I had high hopes. But then I got this email:

..


So! Apples! Them! Like!!!

And I picked that baby up the other day and read it imdamnmediately.

And it was lovely, of course. It's László, you know. And not only did I enjoy his ruminations on Herman Melville (etcetera), but it also made me want to go back and re-read all of his other books (unfortunately it's not a huge pile, but it looks like New Directions is slowly translating the rest of his stuff into English, so more is on the way).

But I have to say that I'm glad that I didn't buy it.

For one thing, that 96 page length? Like uh-uh. This book is packed with pictures. And there are several pages that have a single line of text. All told, you get about 21 pages of László Krasznahorkai's words. And as much as I love him, $40 is way too much to pay for that.

So thanks, LFPL. What would I do without you?