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At 91 pages this is a very short story. The book is a hardback and sewn together, it has expensive feeling paper and contains full colour artwork by Max Neumann, and QR codes that link to the percussive music of Szilveszter Miklós scored for each chapter. László Krasznahorkai is becoming one of my favourite authors not least because he's not afraid to release material like this. That said, I don't think that the art relates to the story in any way and I'm absolutely certain that the music doesn't (and I like drumming). I found it distracting to have to put my book down to listen to the music but I'm sure that someone else would arrange that better. The prose, however, is amazing and the story engaging. The story is set somewhere in Europe (I'd guess the Eastern Bloc) and is about someone who is on the run. The reader does not know from what or from whom just that the narrator is escaping what the narrator calls certain death and he (I'm going to assume the narrator is a man, but it's not clear) is concerned only with the here and now, who it is that hunts him and where they are. It does make some very philosophical points, too. Absolutely gripping. This is what's known as a chase narrative. Highly recommended.

From Wikipedia : The novel is a postmodernist piece, and while it has a plot, many details are not outlined and remain unclear. It consists of two parts, and each part consists of six sections; sections of the second part are numbered in reverse order. Every chapter is a long paragraph which does not contain line breaks. Most of the action occurs in a run-down Hungarian village ("estate") which is in a vicinity of an unnamed town but the inhabitants are almost isolated from the outside world. The main character, Irimiás, a con man posing as a saviour, arrives at the estate, achieves an almost unlimited power over the inhabitants, gets them to give him all their hard-earned money, convinces them to move to another abandoned “estate” nearby, and then brings them to the town, where he disperses them around the country. The purpose of the whole exercise is to give Irimiás money and power. As it turns out the villagers are given good lodgings and Irimiàs gives them money so we wonder if he has taken advantage of them. The prose is brilliant and very well worth reading Recommended.

From Amazon : War & War begins at a point of danger: on a dark train platform Korim is on the verge of being attacked and robbed by thuggish teenagers. From here, we are carried along by the insistent voice of this nervous clerk. Desperate, at times almost mad, but also keenly empathic, Korim has discovered in a small Hungarian town's archives an antique manuscript of startling beauty: it narrates the epic tale of brothers-in-arms struggling to return home from a disastrous war. Korim is determined to do away with himself, but before he commits suicide, he feels he must escape to New York with the precious manuscript and commit it to eternity by typing it all out onto the world wide web. Following Korim with obsessive realism through the streets of New York (from his landing in a Bowery flophouse to his move far uptown with a mad interpreter), War and War relates his encounters with a fascinating range of people in a world torn between viciousness and mysterious beauty. Following the eight chapters of War & War is a short 'prequel acting as a sequel', 'Isaiah', which brings us to a dark bar, years before in Hungary, where Korim rants against the world and threatens suicide. Written like nothing else (turning single sentences into chapters), War & War affirms W. G. Sebald's comment that Krasznahorkai's prose far surpasses all the lesser concerns of contemporary writing. I would add that this book is incredible. It's divided into chapters which are then divided into paragraphs but where this differs from everything else is that the paragraphs are numbered and consist of a single sentence. They vary in length, some are two pages long and some are three lines long. And the story itself is something that I've never read before. I struggled with it until the last chapters but enjoyed it so kept reading. Even though I struggled I wanted to find out what happened next. Weird but recommended