Apocalyptic, paranoid, and frenzied, Chasing Homer is unlike anything I have read before. In fact, it may be unlike anything many have ever read before. Blurring the lines between reality and imagination in a deliberately deranged manner, Nobel laureate László Krasznahorkai’s work defies being pigeonholed into any genre. Careening at breakneck speed towards everything and nothing, the book is a stupendous jaw-dropping one sitting read that has a positively cathartic effect on the reader.

An unnamed narrator, the protagonist is fleeing from the clutches of assassins, whose identities are also suspect. Always on the run, slithering between shadows and sunlight, hugging shorelines, transforming into a peripatetic stowaway on myriad ships and slipping through dense woods, the narrator is fuelled by a contrivance of paranoia and manic determination. The degree of terror engulfing the being of the fugitive is of such a magnitude, so as to leave the reader guessing as to whether the fear is more a figment of a wild imagination running riot than a concrete and tangible element of danger.

In the process of fleeing from nothingness, and towards nothingness, the escapee confounds the reader with incoherent ramblings ranging from metaphysical musings to random deleterious fusillades. Krasznahorkai, as is his peculiar and inimitable wont unleashes gargantuan sentences that span entire chapters. Some of these rants, despite their random nature, leave a searing impact in the minds of the people going through them. For example, consider this breathless philosophical exposition: “I am a prisoner of the instant, and I rush into this instant, an instant that has no continuation, just as it has no earlier version, and I have to tell myself – if I had the time to think about this between two instants – that I have no need for either present or future because neither one exists. But in fact, I have no time between two instants. Since there’s no such thing as two instants.” Allow this to marinate your brain for a couple of minutes.

There seems to be embedded an element of unfortunate clairvoyance in this book. At the time of writing, the world seems to have completely lost the perspective of and between instants. A mindless war ravaging the Middle East has virtually decimated the distinction between the chaser and the chased. The attacker and the attacked seem destined to not just abhor the past and disregard the future but are also displaying startling resoluteness in annihilating the present. Like Krasznahorkai’ s fugitive, the warring factions seem to be living in the present while simultaneously decimating it.

Two unique features of the book lie in the intense multi-coloured pictures by the leading German painter Max Neumann, and a QR code at the beginning of each Chapter (yes, you read this right), scanning which regales the reader with some insane, wild, and maverick percussion music by Szilveszter Miklós, a pioneering Hungarian jazz drummer and improviser.

We will never know whether the running being in Krasznahorkai’ s Chasing Homer is chasing shadows or is being chased by shadows We do not even know whether the adventures are taking place in the inner confines of a deleterious mind. But irrespective of the perceived or plausible threats, keeping up with the pace is an enervating task indeed!