The Melancholy of Resistance by László Krasznahorkai

Author:László Krasznahorkai
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Literary, Fiction
ISBN: 9780811220101
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2002-06-16T23:00:00+00:00

‘It all adds up. You have to get the details right. Focus on the details,’ Eszter determined without any particular feeling of anger, as if distancing himself from his own clumsiness when the hammer hit his hand for the twentieth time while he was putting the final touches to the complex barricade he was erecting at this decisive juncture of his life. Gripping his painfully throbbing finger, he surveyed the chaos of boards and planks that covered the windows and, since there was nothing he could do about his shortcomings regarding this sorry sight, resolved that even if he, through countless decades, had shamefully neglected the art of putting hammer to nail, now that he had practically reached the end of the task he would avoid all such painful experiences henceforth. Having personally collected firewood from the yard on his return home—after a few minutes breather, that is—and piled it up between the bookshelves, he now selected one that would more or less do and, carefully considering the possibility of minor adjustments—a consideration that sprang from the apparent senselessness of being here at all, which in turn was a natural concomitant of the line of thought he had pursued in the gateway some three hours ago, a line that caused him to revise and re-evaluate all his previous opinions on the subject and which he therefore considered to be of almost a ‘revolutionary’ nature—he fitted the plank to the space left at the bottom of the jumble of boards covering the last window, but having raised his hammer and bit his lip, determined to carry the matter through in the distant hope of striking the nail-head perfectly the first time round, he immediately lowered it, perceiving that sheer ferocity of will would not ensure both the proper direction and the power of the blow. ‘The arc to be controlled is the one that determines the relationship between the head of the instrument and the head of the nail …’ he decided, contemplating the problem for a few moments, and while his thoughts slowly returned to the matter of ‘minor adjustments’, using all the power of his injured left hand to thrust the plank up against the window-frame, he blindly swung the hammer with his right. This did not result in any greater damage than had already been inflicted and, what was more, the nail-head sank a little further into the wood, but as to the previously rational-sounding idea of channelling the remnants of his already wandering attention into the genuinely valuable effort of observing the so-called arc, he thought better of it. After all, the hammer in his hand felt increasingly unsteady and the results of such experimentation would become ever more unpredictable, so, after the third effort, he had to admit that the fact that he hadn’t missed the nail in three successive goes, far from being due to his level of concentration, was probably down to sheer luck, or, to employ his own formulation, to a certain ‘benevolent

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