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Herscht 07769 by László Krasznahorkai: Florian Herscht, a young German man with no family and an ambiguous learning disability, has become convinced that he - and perhaps he alone - can see the end of the universe coming, due to his misunderstanding of an adult education class in particle physics. What is to be done about this? Why, he needs to inform Angela Merkel. Angela Merkel will know just what to do. In his free time Florian writes letter after letter to Angela Merkel; the rest of the time he works for the Boss, who runs both a cleaning company (Florian's business) and a unit of militant neo-Nazis marshalled in their fading, impoverished former industrial village (not Florian's business, despite the Boss's ongoing efforts to indoctrinate him).

The cover of this novel is emblazoned very prominently with its author's prestigious awards (he is last year's Nobel laureate in Literature and has also received an International Booker) but that's not why I read it. I read it because my sister's boyfriend pressed his unwanted copy on me with the irresistibly flattering remark that he absolutely hated it but that I, a more serious reader than him, would surely be equal to its challenge. This worked on me a little too well and I devoured the book over two and a bit days, despite the fact that it is, in fact, quite difficult.

Specifically, it is difficult because the whole thing is written in a single sentence. At least in its English translation (by Ottilie Mulzet; the original is in Hungarian) this obviously involves some abuses of grammar, and with no chapter, paragraph or even sentence breaks, you don't really feel like you can stop. I spent the first fifty pages or so involuntarily trying to dismantle the prose into more traditional units in my head before I finally got into the flow of it; after that it was a dreamlike, slightly bewildering reading experience, where I gave up trying to keep strict track of the chronology (it jumps around all over the place, back and forth in time as well as freely between characters' heads) and just let the story wash over me. Set shortly before and during the COVID pandemic, it is perhaps around 70% supremely petty goings-on between a community of ageing smalltown Germans and their beloved village idiot, and then 30% appalling Nazi violence; the result is darkly funny, depressing, infuriating, and quietly apocalyptic in its portrayal of a way of life that is in irreversible global decline. I'm not exactly hoping the prose style catches on more broadly, but I did very much enjoy myself.

The Knight and the Moth by Rachel Gillig: This has been marketed all wrong! It's neither romantasy nor fantasy proper, and if you try to read it as either, you get major structural and stylistic problems. What it actually is - and what it does a really good job of being, imo - is a fairytale. An original, longform, gothic fairytale updated to millennial/gen z sensibilities. If you've ever read one of those "feminist fairytale retellings" that have been so prominent on bookstore shelves in recent years, that's going to give you the closest sense of what reading this book is like.

Our heroine, Sybil, was taken into Aisling Cathedral as a child and has no memories of her life before being inducted as one of her faith's six Diviners. These girls - always girls - have the power to foretell the future through their dreams as they are drowned to unconsciousness in a magical spring. But as the Diviners' ten year period of service nears its close, and the now adult young women look forward to their freedom in the wider kingdom, they start vanishing one by one. Sybil flees the cathedral and sets out on a quest to discover what has happened to her sisters, helped along the way by an adorably eccentric gargoyle and a devilishly handsome, abrasive knight named Rodrick Myndacious.

(Yes, his name is actually Myndacious.)

The worldbuilding in this story is a lot of fun but not at all to be taken seriously. The characters all read like ordinary modern people who have agreed to live under a feudal system for the #aesthetic but see no actual reason why that other guy over there (the king of the realm) should think he's any better than them! Get over yourself, Your Majesty! The Diviners are Vestal Virgins who smoke fantasy marijuana, have casual sex to their hearts' content, and affectionately call each other "shrews" instead of "bitches". The kingdom's economy is in the silliest state since the king from Sleeping Beauty ordered all his land's fibrecraft to a halt: there are only five hamlets, each of which is entirely devoted to (respectively) the crafts of Scribe, Forester, Fisherman, Merchant or Weaver; the earth just tills itself, I guess. The author also spoon-feeds every moral message and plot development with such fondly infantilising care that I had accurately guessed the entire book's trajectory by the time we were done with the set-up. But this is kind of why I'm harping on genre: nobody reads fairytales because they're in serious suspense as to whether Sleeping Beauty will really wake up, or whether Cinderella will really get her prince. I would have liked it even better if I'd been allowed to feed myself, but at the end of the day, the stuff on the spoon tasted really damn good.

This book is only the first in a series called The Stonewater Kingdom; the next instalment is due this September, and I'm going to have to read it, because the ending of the first is too dark to be left alone. I mean, I can pretty much already guess how it's all going to resolve, but I won't feel satisfied until I see it happen. The final book of The Hurricane Wars trilogy is also due out shortly after, in October, so I guess the back end of this year is going to be heavy on enemies(ish)-to-lovers popcorn reads with endearingly silly worldbuilding for me.