In store now! Spadework for a Palace by László Krasznahorkai
Spadework for a Palace is perhaps the best entrypoint to Krasznahorkai’s work and worldview. Taking the shape of a single sentence, it’s 80-or-so pages rocket from one crazed notion to the next, as our author guides us through the strange web of the narrator’s increasingly deteriorating mental state.
Filled with allusion, humour, madness, and a deep empathetic intelligence, Spadework for a Palace can be consumed in a single, relentless sitting. Part of New Directions’ Short Reads series, it is a beautiful, strange, and totally unique work by the greatest of our contemporary authors.
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Order your copy today directly through October Books or buy online through our bookshop store and we’ll get a commission on your purchase.
Spadework for a Palace by László Krasznahorkai
Paperback £12.99
Spadework for a Palace bears the subtitle “Entering the Madness of Others” and offers an epigraph: “Reality is no obstacle.” Indeed. This high-octane obsessive rant vaults over all obstacles, fueled by the idées fixe of a “gray little librarian” with fallen arches whose name—mr herman melvill—is merely one of the coincidences binding him to his lodestar Herman Melville (“I too resided on East 26th Street…I, too, had worked for a while at the Customs Office”), which itself is just one aspect of his also being “constantly conscious of his connectedness” to Lebbeus Woods, to the rock that is Manhattan, to the “drunkard Cowley” and his Lunar Caustic, to Bartok. And with this consciousness of connection he is not only gaining true knowledge of Melville but also tracing the paths to “a Serene Paradise of Knowledge.” Driven to save that palace (a higher library he also serves), he loses his job and his wife leaves him, but “people must be told the truth”: THERE IS NO DUALISM IN EXISTENCE. And his dream, in fact, will be “realized, for I am not giving up: I am merely a day-laborer, a spade-worker on this dream, a herman melvill, a librarian from the lending desk, currently an inmate at Bellevue, but at the same time—may I say this?—actually a Keeper of the Palace.”
Order your copy today directly from October Books or buy online through our bookshop store and we’ll get commission on your purchase.
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