Chasing Homer

August 23, 2021
Krasznahorkai’s strange and engrossing novella (after Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming) reads like a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie dreamed up by Beckett and Kafka. Killers with an unknown motive are chasing the narrator, who has become by necessity an autodidact of survival skills, through Croatia along the Adriatic Coast. At a tourist bar in Korčula, holed up after being chilled to the bone by ominous gusts of the “Bora,” the hero overhears a tour guide convince a couple to let him lead them on a tour of Mljet, a small island believed by its inhabitants to be the true location of Odysseus’s sojourn with Calypso, and follows them there. The hero’s account up to this point has been filled with reports of fast, chaotic, unpredictable movement to ward off the hunters, and of pledges to resist the animalistic pleasures in life, which would lead to doom, but at Korčula, something changes.
Batki’s translation exquisitely captures the grace underlying the hero’s frenetic mindset (“I must plunge, from the edge of a moment right into its midst, just like some Moby-Dick, or a dying butterfly between two flower petals”), as do the vignettes scored by free jazz drummer Szilveszter Miklós for each chapter (accessible via QR codes that appear in the text). Whether on a large canvas or small, Krasznahorkai never ceases to impress.

June 1, 2021

In this latest from the challenging Krasznahorkai, winner of the 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature for Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming and the 2015 Man Booker International Prize for his oeuvre, a hunted creature flees frantically southward through Europe, seeking to escape death. With full-color paintings by Max Neumann and a rattlingly percussive score by Szilveszter Mikl�s associated with each chapter and accessed via QR codes.

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from September 1, 2021
The always noteworthy Hungarian novelist Krasznahorkai delivers a postmodern study of alienation and exile. The reference to Homer in the title becomes clear late in this deceptively short novel. Its unnamed narrator is a man who has been on the run for years, possibly even "decades," sure neither of chronology nor of his pursuers. All he knows, he tells us in onrushing prose whose sentences take pages to resolve, is that "my only chance of survival is to flee--and to keep on fleeing." One of the places to which he flees takes him into the company of a tour guide on a Croatian island who invokes both The Tempest and The Odyssey, its heroes travelers whose returns home are ever in peril. "Look here now, this is Homer, it's not me speaking, but Homer himself, understand what I'm saying?" the tour guide harangues a Japanese couple who appear unconvinced by his reading of the epic's opening lines, and, when he doesn't win them over, he delivers a manifesto that could be straight out of Lenin: "The right to hospitality is finished, tourism is dead!" Tourists are everywhere in our narrator's way, clogging up traffic across his history-haunted Europe in "herds flocked together to see the sights of a given locale, or on a train, or aboard a ship, or standing in line for food...." As he travels, the narrator muses on sanity and insanity, on (with hints of Elias Canetti) crowds and their manipulation, and on the ideal of the good transmogrified into an impediment that "lulls you and dulls you...[so that] now you can relax, stretch, crack your knuckles and kick back." There is no rest, no comfort in thoughts of the good, for this man in flight from unknown others who may be secret police agents, assassins, or mere hunters. Particularly beguiling are the percussive sonic vignettes that accompany the book chapter by chapter, available online via QR codes at the head of each. Allusive and acerbic: a brilliant work that proves the adage that even paranoiacs have enemies.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.