A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East by László Krasznahorkai belongs to the branch of literature that’s more “do unusual things with words” than “tell a story.” I picked it up on a recent trip to Frankfurt because Krasznahorkai won the 2025 Nobel Prize for Literature, and the book itself is short at 130 pages. If nothing else, I figured it might be a good introduction to his work.

The lengthy title comes from the proper orientation of a Buddhist monastery, where most of the book takes place. It is not far from Kyoto, but getting there is not easy, and the book’s unattributed epigraph might also serve as a warning to the characters, if they could but read it: “None saw it twice.” Krasznahorkai relates his observations in 49 chapters numbered in Roman numerals beginning with II and ending with L. Presumably, beginning with the chapter two is meant to imply that readers are joining an ongoing tale, the beginning of which will remain unknown to readers and characters alike.

The chapters are short, but the sentences are long. Numerous chapters are one extended sentence Chapter XXVII, to pick one more or less at random, stretches its sentence across three full pages. They’re run-ons, of course. Mann and Proust delighted in clauses and conjunctions; sometimes when reading them I had the impression that finding out how many grammatical balls they could juggle was at least half the fun of writing that particular bit. Krasznahorkai does a fair amount of that, but he also charges straight through where even an extended sentence would normally end and just keeps going. (Although I lived in Budapest for a year and a bit, I never studied Hungarian systematically, so I certainly couldn’t say whether Krasznahorkai’s style in this book is as much of a stumbling block in the original as I found it in English. I suspect that it is; certainly Miklos Bánffy, the only other Hungarian writer I’ve read much of this century, does not take a similar approach.)

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