My confession: the only reason I read Herscht 07769 is because it’s one really, really long…

My confession: the only reason I read Herscht 07769 is because it’s one really, really long sentence.

A single four-hundred-and-six-page sentence, to be precise.

And it has a cool cover. Kind of an axe-looking thing drawn in a bloody way on a matte black cover.

Here are some other reasons to read this book:

• The author, László Krasznahorkai, won the Nobel Prize in Literature.
• Someone at the Telegraph called this book ‘a work of genius’.
• It’s a story about Nazis, particle physics and classical music…

…and what more could you need in a story?

But really, for me, it was the format that was most intriguing. And intimidating. After I bought the book it sat on my shelf for a few weeks before I had time to pick it up. That whole time, I was half psyching myself out that it would be an excruciating effort to actually read the thing. It was going to be boring. It was going to be literature overkill. It was definitely going to be confusing. It was going to hurt my brain and then put me to sleep.

Was it true? Not at all.

In fact, despite the heavy subject matter, the long meandering sentence style was quite cozy.

In one way, it’s written so smooth and seamless that it lends itself for a kind of immersion and escapism. It puts you in its world and keeps you there. And there’s a safety net built into the format that I can only call a “loopiness.” Time and space bend in a sort of free association that moves from conversations, to narrative, from space to place, and through the past, future, and present. But not in an annoying way that loses you every other page. Instead, it’s the opposite. The loops keep you returning to homebase, even if you’ve strayed away for a few pages, you never feel lost from the plot.

Here I have to say the word Bach.

Bach’s music is an important character in this novel, but Bach’s style — I’m told by the internet — has even more significance with this book. Bach didn’t just write beautiful music. He was also extremely methodical about how he wrote music. He obsessively repeated the same theme within a single piece in distorted ways. He would rewrite the music in different tones, pitches, and speeds — even inverting themes or rewriting them in reverse.

And here I need to stop talking about Bach because I really can’t explain how the book follows the format of a fugue. But what I can say is that when you read it, you feel it. It’s the looping of timelines and themes — returning to ideas, building thicker and deeper symbolism, leaping forward and backward without ever fully losing the story. You sense the underlying structure, even if you can’t see it. And it is kind of awe-inspiring just to know it’s there.

It’s a hypnotic style that lets this super sentence wrap around your brain and pull you into another world. A world of nationalism vs. bureaucracy, former glory vs. slow decay, big ideas vs. feeble minds, and vulnerability vs. vengeance.

There’s just a lot packed into this book. And, while I’m focused on the format, it would be criminal to not mention that it really is an ingenious reflection of today’s world and the reemergence of old ideological rivals across the globe. No prediction of winners or losers here. In the end, just a long sentence finished with a stroke of beauty in the last few words.

It’s neither good nor bad, but tragic.

I was left musing about the mysticism of eagles, wolves, and man’s return to the wild, wondering if we always just end up back at the beginning — ready to do it all over again.