Description
Book SynopsisA joyful ode—in a single soaring, crazy sentence—to the interconnectedness of great (and mad) minds
Trade Review"Krasznahorkai establishes his own rules and rides a wave of exhilarating energy. Apocalyptic, visionary, and mad, it flies off the page and stays lodged intractably wherever it lands." -- Publishers Weekly
"One of the most important—and eccentric—writers working today." -- Hari Kunzru - The Spectator
"A single eighty-page-long sentence, scrawled in the journal of a “gray little librarian” who is named “herman melvill,” and who is losing his mind. By choosing this difficult form and this metafictional name, Krasznahorkai comes dangerously close to replicating the brainy but predictable tropes of deconstructionist archive fiction. Yet
Spadework for a Palace also attempts to diagnose a fresh variant of archive fever—a kind of repulsion, native to an age of incomprehensible databases and sublime technology, that drives its sufferer to give up the task of archival interpretation altogether." -- Tadhg Larabee - Boston Review
"Breathtaking and hypnotic, this unorthodox novella boldly merges fiction, travelogue and literary criticism into one 96-page sentence." -- Thuy Dinh - National Public Radio
"If
Spadework has a moral, as storybooks are supposed to, it is that ‘There is no duality in existence.’ We have one life to live, this storybook tells us, and it is not ours." -- J.W. McCormack - The New Left Review
