A MOUNTAIN TO THE NORTH • Book Review

A MOUNTAIN TO THE NORTH, A LAKE TO THE SOUTH, PATHS TO THE WEST, A RIVER TO THE EAST
by László Krasznahorkai
translated by Ottilie Mulzet
New Directions, 144 pages
reviewed by Dylan Cook

It would be fair to say that there’s only one real, human character in A Mountain to the North, but even that feels generous. The grandson of Prince Genji, as he’s referred to throughout the novella, isn’t substantial enough to have his own name. He wears a kimono and geta, he gets motion sickness, and he loves gardens. He isn’t very notable, but he isn’t lacking either. He may be the only person, but he’s a supporting player, and as such his costars of trees, rocks, water, and wind often outshine him. The grandson of Prince Genji is our tour guide, a human figure we can hang our hats on as László Krasznahorkai chips away at the real story: the relentless, unending march of time over millions and billions of years.

Geologic time may seem like a comically large topic for a novella, but it’s in good hands. Across his career, the Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai has proven that he’s more than capable of tackling big, thorny ideas with uniquely haunting clarity. His breakthrough novel Satantango, a harsh critique of communism, is so intricate and expansive that the film adaptation runs over seven hours long. Krasznahorkai’s later works, such as The Melancholy of Resistance or the National Book Award-winning Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, contend heavily with imminent apocalypses. They’re novels meant to unsettle, caution, and provoke. A Mountain to the North is pleasantly lighter than these other texts but still retains the same thematic grandeur. Here, Krasznahorkai is offering perspective more than politics. He has a worldview to show us, so it falls upon us to, “simply look, and be silent.”

Geologic time may seem like a comically large topic for a novella, but it’s in good hands.

The grandson of Prince Genji abides by this order. Slowly, we learn that he’s looking for a garden that he’s read about but never seen. His search brings him to an unnamed monastery outside of Kyoto, which establishes itself as the centerpiece of the narrative. Like Herman Melville describing a whale, Krasznahorkai leads us through the monastery with an architect’s eye for detail. The monastery is about one thousand years old, built during the Heian Period, but feels timeless, as if it were a natural feature. In a way, it is. The location of the monastery, in between the mountain, lake, paths, and river of the novella’s title, is “perfectly designated” to harmonize with its surroundings. Further still, all the materials used to build it were carefully sourced to complement the world around it. Take, for example, the consideration that went into choosing lumber:

The heavy columns, supporting a substantial weight, the framework of the sanctuaries, would be fashioned from those trees that had grown on the mountain peak; the base of the mountain provided the timber for the long lintels, because the trees at the mountain’s base had to struggle more intensely to reach the sunlight than the trees on the mountain peak.

Every choice was full of intention, no matter how trivial the details may have seemed. The result is a monastery that’s both structurally superior (after all, most buildings don’t last a thousand years) and pays respect to its natural context. Both are important. We humans want our handiwork to endure, to leave a mark that says, “I was here” long after we’re gone, but we have to be deliberate about the marks we choose to leave. In the long run, nature will likely be kinder to us if we make more symbiotic monasteries and fewer plastics and electronics. As the band Modest Mouse perfectly put it, “If the world don’t like us / it’ll shake us just like we were a cold.”

That’s how we may fare in the long run, but what about the long, long run? Krasznahorkai answers this not by looking forward, but by tunneling further back into the past. Choosing the right hinoki trees was essential, and that process began with, “the selection of a certain mountain upon which trees had grown for at least one thousand years.” Later on, Krasznahorkai describes the ecological ballet required to put those trees on that mountain. And the mountain, too, was shaped by great geological processes. And the minerals that comprise the mountain were likewise crafted by eons of chemistry. Everything we know, everythere there has ever been, has all been made by the, “complex and immeasurably serious play of divine happenstance […], the enthralling order of ions and atoms in the universe and here on Earth.”

Krasznahorkai is a master of these humbling revelations. By and large, A Mountain to the North tries to make us feel small, both in time and space. Despite being the only real character, the grandson of Prince Genji is a marginal figure because all of humanity is marginal in the grand scheme of things. Krasznahorkai reminds us that humanity’s existence was a natural result of possibility and probability – we had and have little choice in the matter. Yet, A Mountain to the North never revels in nihilism. Meaning is something we search for, just like the grandson of Prince Genji searches for his garden. We’re small, but we’re no less important than any of the billions of years that preceded us. Krasznahorkai wants us to get comfortable with this idea, because only then can we, “begin to see that there [is] only the whole, and no details.”

Dylan Cook is a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied creative writing and biology. He currently lives and works in Chicago. He’s often reading and writing, and when he’s not doing either of these things, he can be found working in a genetics lab, lost in the woods somewhere, or at [email protected].