Just like that, 2025 has closed. That’s another year in the books. I hope 2025 has treated you well. With the new year, I hope everyone is treated with kindness. As time takes its natural course, I hope everyone’s wishes and prayers will be answered this year. But before I could wave goodbye to December and 2025, let me share the book titles I acquired during the month. Like the past five months, my December purchases are more limited than usual. The second half of the year, albeit without design, was about holding myself up. This aligns with my New Year’s resolution to read more and buy less. Without ado, here are the books I acquired in December.

Title: Herscht 07769
Author: László Krasznahorkai
Translator (from Hungarian): Ottilie Mulzet
Publisher: New Directions
Publishing Date: 2024 (2021)
No. of Pages: 406

Synopsis: 

The gentle giant Florian Herscht has a problem: having faithfully attended Herr Köhler’s adult education classes in physics, he is convinced that disaster is imminent. And so he embarks upon a one-sided correspondence with Chancellor Angela Merkel, to convince her of the danger of the complete destruction of all physical matter. Florian works for the Boss (the head of a local neo-Nazi gang), who has taken him under his wing and gotten him work as a graffiti cleaner in the small eastern German town of Kana. The Boss is enraged by a graffiti artist who is defacing the various monuments to Johann Sebastian Bach in Thuringia with wolf emblems. A Bach fanatic and director of an amateur orchestra, the Boss is determined to catch the culprit with the help of his gang. Florian has no choice but to join the chase. Havoc ensues when real wolves are sighted in the area . . .

Written in one cascading sentence with the power of atomic particles colliding, Krasznahorkai’s novel is a tour de force, a morality play, a blistering satire, a hilarious and devastating encapsulation of our helplessness at the moral and environmental dilemmas we face today.

Title: War and War
Author: László Krasznahorkai
Translator (from Hungarian): George Szirtes
Publisher: Tuskar Rock Press
Publishing Date: 2016 (1999)
No. of Pages: 279

Synopsis: 

In the archives of a small Hungarian town, the suicidal clerk Korin has discovered an antique manuscript of startling beauty narrating the epic tale of brothers-in-arms returning home from a disastrous war. Korin is determined to kill himself, but first he must commit the precious manuscript to eternity by typing it all out onto the internet. And to do so he must travel to the nexus of the known world: New York. There on the city’s streets, Korin encounters a raft of eccentrics, and as his desperate mind swings from lucidity to lunacy he finds himself lost in a world torn between viciousness and mysterious beauty.

Title: The Melancholy of Resistance
Author: László Krasznahorkai
Translator (from Hungarian): George Szirtes
Publisher: New Directions
Publishing Date: 2000 (1989)
No. of Pages: 314

Synopsis: 

The Melancholy of Resistance, László Krasznahorkai’s magisterial, surreal novel, depicts a chain of mysterious events in a small Hungarian town. A circus, promising to display the stuffed body of the largest whale in the world, arrives in the dead of winter, prompting bizarre rumors. Word spreads that the circus folk have a sinister purpose in mind, and the frightened citizens cling to any manifestation of order they can find – music, cosmology, fascism. The novel’s characters are unforgettable: the evil Mrs. Eszter, plotting her takeover of the town; her weakling husband; and Valuska, our hapless hero with his head in the clouds, who is the tender center of the book, the only pure and noble soul to be found.

Compact, powerful and intense, The Melancholy of Resistance, as its enomoursly gifted translator George Szirtes puts it, “is a slow lava flow of narrative, a vast black river of type.” And yet, miraculously, the novel, in the words of The Guardian, “lifts the reader along in lunar leaps and bounds.”