Book Review: A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East by Laszlo Krasznahorkai

I was browsing in the English language section of a bookshop in Faro, Portugal, and saw some books by the 2025 Nobel Laureate for Literature. I’d never read any of his books before and so I followed my normal rule and chose the thinnest book. I was also remembering my recent experience with the first book I’d read by the 2024 Nobel Laureate for Literature.

This is a superb book full of lyrical and serene poetry written as prose. There’s no dialogue and no defining story – each reader will complete this book in their own way and when I read this book again in 2-3 years, it will mean something different to me.

There are 49 chapters in 128 pages. Some chapters are one sentence and others two sentences, but there’s no Virginia Woolf-like jamming of adverbs and semi-colons into paragraphs here, the words flow naturally like a stream finding its own way somewhere else.

The grandson of Prince Genji looks for a hidden garden in a monastery in Kyoto. He first read about this hidden garden when a book called One Hundred Beautiful Gardens turned up accidentally in his hands one day towards the end of the Tokugawa. The grandson has been captivated by this one garden ever since. He investigates and inspects and searches the buildings and grounds, but only finds occasional intrusions of horrid reality.

The grandson leaves the monastery and goes to the station to catch the Keihan train. The doors open, no one gets on, but the platform is empty after the train has gone.