Laszlo Krasznahorkai's CHASING HOMER (Tr John Batki)

...when you stand there paralyzed and stinking, doused with gasoline, and see the flame of that lighter getting closer and closer, and when you still just managed to feel yourself being slightly lifted by the propulsive force of the explosion, only to have your small body spatter into tiny fragments before it's consumed, go ahead and try querying then about such things as: what is life.

What if the most melancholy writer out of Hungary suddenly decided to write his version of Run, Lola Run, but, instead of giving it a driving techno soundtrack, turned to an avant garde jazz composer for a bunch of creepily compelling tracks to accompany each chapter of the resulting novella? And disdained to give us any back story as to explain why his protagonist is a desperate fugitive? And what if he also turned to an illustrator of intense and compelling abstract-expressionist imagery to further enhance the work? You'd wind up with an exquisite keepsake of a chapbook that would not stand out on your shelf at all due to its diminutive size, but would be glad to have on hand whenever you needed a little emotional jolt.

Unfortunately, I was only able to get Chasing Homer out from my public library. As an ebook.

This did not, though, in any way, diminish its impact. For one thing, Max Neumann's artwork looks great in grey scale (there's not a great deal of color in the original images); for another, it doesn't matter what format you're reading in to enjoy the text and hit the embedded QR codes at the beginning of each chapter so you can listen to the short percussion-only tracks scored by Miklós Szilveszter. Which, like all film nerds, I've always associated Krasznahorkai with composer Vig Mihalyi, but he can hit me with a new-to-me Hungarian anytime he wants!

But so, Chasing Homer. So named not because it's the protagonist's name, but that of the very idea of Homer, the poet, as the chase proceeds through country most of the world first came to know, and possibly will only ever know, as described by him/them. I think.

Who is chasing whom, though, and why? If you can't enjoy a work of prose fiction without having answers to questions like these, this isn't the novella for you; it's not about that at all, for all that our unnamed protagonist is constantly on the move, barely daring to rest or eat or drink or even eliminate, lest his relentless unknown pursuers catch up to him at last. It's about the movement, constant and relentless and breathless and frantic.

Through our fugitive's eyes (I'm going to use a singular they to refer to them here, though I reckon the protagonist is probably male; I find that there is a whole level of female prey experience that is missing from this narrative), the whole of 21st century society is one giant pack of predators, carefully watching and waiting for a misstep or a pause; every stranger who does or does not make eye contact a spotter or a herder there to steer one into a trap as they proceed from street to street, neighborhood to neighborhood, city to countryside, country to country. Crowds can be simultaneously a refuge and a menace, to disappear into or be caught at last within. Movement is on foot, by bus or train or boat, it doesn't matter. One can never be sure that they've shaken a particular perceived pursuer, let alone the pursuit as a whole.

The resulting novella feels even shorter than it really is, raising the reader's heartbeat and then leaving her panting as though she herself had just had to sprint away from trouble. I've never done cocaine or much in the way of any other stimulant stronger than caffeine but I imagine I'd feel much the same from the jolt of this book, if I did.