The Last Wolf & Herman

ISBN-13: 9780811226080 / Angielski / Twarda / 2016 / 128 str.

Laszlo Krasznahorkai; George Szirtes

Opis

The Last Wolf, translated by George Szirtes, features a classic, obsessed Krasznahorkai narrator, a man hired to write (by mistake, by a glitch of fate) the true tale of the last wolf of Extremadura, a barren stretch of Spain. This miserable experience (being mistaken for another, dragged about a cold foreign place, appalled by a species' end) is narrated--all in a single sentence--as a sad looping tale, a howl more or less, in a dreary wintry Berlin bar to a patently bored bartender.The Last Wolf is Krasznahorkai in a maddening nutshell--with the narrator trapped in his own experience (having internalized the extermination of the last creature of its kind and -locked Extremadura in the depths of his own cold, empty, hollow heart-)--enfolding the reader in the exact same sort of entrapment to and beyond the end, with its first full-stop period of the book.Herman, -a peerless virtuoso of trapping who guards the splendid mysteries of an ancient craft gradually sinking into permanent oblivion, - is asked to clear a forest's last -noxious beasts.- In Herman I: the Game Warden, he begins with great zeal, although in time he -suspects that maybe he was 'on the wrong scent.'- Herman switches sides, deciding to track entirely new game...In Herman II: The Death of a Craft, the same situation is viewed by strange visitors to the region. Hyper-sexualized aristocratic officers on a very extended leave are enjoying a saturnalia with a bevy of beauties in the town nearest the forest. With a sense of effete irony, they interrupt their orgies to pitch in with the manhunt of poor Herman, and in the end, -only we are left to relish the magic bouquet of this escapade...- Translated by John Batki.