Aprómunka egy palotáért

（就是The Manhattan Project所谈的Spadework for a Palace）
The protagonist and narrator of Krasznahorkai’s latest novel is a New York librarian named Herman Melvill. The missing letter ‘e’ doesn’t stop vultures from continuously pestering him as Melville’s descendent, when he is merely an embittered namesake of the Moby Dick author. Nor does it help that he used to work as a customs officer, similar to the renowned predecessor, and he lives in the same area of Manhattan as the illustrious novelist. As he’s understandably forced to learn more and more about the great Melville, and consequently other geniuses of the time unfamiliar to him, in a feverish monologue he shares his thoughts with us about the metropolis, art and about what he would consider to be a true library, one where the books are illegible and the building is never open: “the ideal library, I don’t know, has 53 million books, and stands there like a treasure no one can touch, because it preserves its own worth by always being able to hold true to its worth, in other words, it’s never available so as to always stay fully available.” The novel’s motto is “reality is not an obstacle.” And it isn’t either; Krasznahorkai’s potent towering sentences are like the skyscrapers built on the Manhattan-island rock: they seem to exist only to conquer the impossible.