The World Goes On

The World Goes On (Hungarian title: Megy a világ) is the second short-story collection by the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai. The Hungarian original was published in 2013, and the English translation was shortlisted for the 2018 International Booker Prize. The book contains twenty-one short pieces divided into three parts—"He Speaks," "Narratives," and "Farewell"—and includes a text whose pages are entirely blank. Three pieces in the book—"The World Goes On," "At the Latest in Turin," and "Walking in a Space Without Blessing"—are considered the direct inspiration for Béla Tarr's film The Turin Horse. These stories do not advance by traditional plot; instead they let ghostly figures such as Nietzsche, 9/11, and Gagarin flicker through the text, spreading the stage to Shanghai, Kyiv, Turin, Istanbul, and Hong Kong, and writing of ordinary people pushed to the margins of the world: a traveler pondering the world's direction after 9/11, a Russian cosmonaut of mysterious origins, a translator driven to the brink of collapse by his obsession with a waterfall, a Portuguese child laborer who escapes into another reality. "The Nine-Dragon Pillar" is a story set in Shanghai; the title piece, "The World Goes On," centers on the immense spiritual shock borne by people as the old world collapses and a new one arrives. The contents are as follows: He Speaks—Wandering on Foot, On Speed, Lest We Forget, Beautiful as It Is, At the Latest in Turin, The World Goes On, The Universal Theseus, A Hundred in All, Not on Heraclitus's Road; Narratives—The Nine-Dragon Pillar, On Route 381, Molnár Henrik Fehér György, The Banker, The Water Drop, Downhill at Lindau, The Bill, That Was Gagarin, The Theory of Obstacles, Walking in a Space Without Blessing, Istanbul Swan (79 Paragraphs on a Blank Page); Farewell—Nothing More to Ask From Now On.