''War and War'' () is a 1999 novel by the Hungarian writer

László Krasznahorkai László Krasznahorkai (; born 5 January 1954) is a Hungarian novelist and screenwriter known for difficult and demanding novels, often labeled postmodern, with dystopian and melancholic themes. Several of his works, including his novels '' ...

. It tells the story of a Hungarian man who is obsessed with a mysterious manuscript, which he decides to travel to

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

to write down and post on the Internet. An English translation by

George Szirtes George Szirtes (; born 29 November 1948) is a British poet and translator from the Hungarian language into English. Originally from Hungary, he has lived in the United Kingdom for most of his life after coming to the country as a refugee at the ...

was published in 2006.

Reception

The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issues ...

's'' James Wood wrote in 2011: "this is one of the most profoundly unsettling experiences I have had as a reader. By the end of the novel, I felt that I had got as close as literature could possibly take me to the inhabiting of another person, and, in partble fictions, its own grotesquely fertile pain ('Heaven is sad')."

References

External links

''War and War''
at the Hungarian publisher's website
''War and War''
at the American publisher's website {{László Krasznahorkai 1999 novels Hungarian novels Works by László Krasznahorkai Magvető books