• ISBN13: 9780811234474
• Binding: Paperback
• Subject: General Books
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Publisher Imprint: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Publication Date: November 8, 2022
• Pages: 144
• Original Price: USD 15.95
• Language: English
• Edition: N/A
• Item Weight: 137 grams
• BISAC Subject(s): World Literature / Hungary

The grandson of Prince Genji lives outside of space and time and wanders the grounds of an old monastery in Kyoto. The monastery, too, is timeless: a place of prayer and deliverance, with barely a trace of any human presence. The wanderer is searching for a garden that has long captivated him: "he continually saw the garden in his mind's eye without being able to touch its existence."
This exquisitely beautiful novel by National Book Award-winner László Krasznahorkai--perhaps his most serene and poetic work--describes a search for the unobtainable and the riches to be discovered along the way. Despite the difficulties in finding the garden, the reader is closely introduced to the construction processes of the monastery (described in poetic detail) as well as the geological and biological processes of the surrounding area (the underground layers revealed beneath a bed of moss, the travels of cypress-tree seeds on the wind, feral foxes and stray dogs meandering outside the monastery's walls), making this an unforgettable meditation on nature, life, history, and being.

Krasznahorkai, László: -

WINNER OF THE 2025 NOBEL PRIZE

The winner of the 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature and the 2015 Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement, László Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, Hungary.

Mulzet, Ottilie: -

Ottilie Mulzet is a literary critic and translator of Hungarian. Mulzet received the National Book Award for Translated Literature in 2019 for her translation of László Krasznahorkai's Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming and the Best Translated Book Award in 2014 for her translation of Krasznahorkai's Seiobo There Below.