"Seiobo There Below," a not-quite novel by Hungary's star postmodern author László Krasznahorkai, is a delight, a puzzle, a frustration and a joy.
Seiobo There Below, by László Krasznahorkai (translated by Ottilie Mulzet).New Directions, Fiction.Rating: ★★★★★
It has neither sentences nor paragraphs, only unbroken torrents of words, some an entire chapter long. There are 17 of those chapters, numbered according to the Fibonacci sequence, in which each number is the sum of the two before it, rising from 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 up to 1,597 and, finally, 2,584. Which sounds as pretentious as hell (indeed, some critics have suggested that "Seiobo There Below" is about hell, while others insist that, no, it is plainly about the divine) — and yet, somehow, it's not.