CHASING HOMER

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.