The Long Pursuit of Consciousness Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s Chasing Homer

By Mphuthumi Ntabeni

The only book I have ever read by the winner of 2025 Nobel Prize fpin Literature, Laszlo Krasznahorkai, is Chasing Homer.  Krasznahorkai is known as literature’s master of dread and haunting themes of unbearable persistence of being. The novel fuses prose, music, and visual art. It reads like a feverish fugue of paranoia, set to the rhythm of pursuit of something the reader is never quite certain about. The friend who recommended it to me motivated for it in this manner: “Think of what happens if Beckett’s last man were to be given the stamina of Odysseus, forever running, never arriving while in perpetual thought haunt.” I was sold.

The first long passage, which is a long sentence, best captures the novel’s hallucinatory velocity begins: “Killers are on my trail, and not swans, of course not swans…” From this line onward, we are plunged into a voice that cannot rest. Krasznahorkai’s narrator, breathless, self-correcting, obsessive, embodies the condition of modern exile that is hunted by unseen forces and their own consciousness. The syntax stretches like a wire pulled to the point of snapping, sentences spiralling on for pages without release. Every clause circles back on itself, as though language were the only shield against annihilation. Unfortunately the writing style exhausted me instead of drawing me. 

After it I immediately read All the Devils Are Here by David Seabrook, to see if it was the genre or Krasznahorkai personal style that fatigued me. It turned out I have no problem with the genre because I instantly loved All the Devils Are Here and read it in almost one stint. I felt vague metaphysical pursuit on it, not just mere paranoia, which, unfortunately is what disappointed me with Chasing Homer. You never really know where you are, the killers may be real, or merely an invention of his mind, the embodiment of guilt, history, or the crushing weight of time. The prose is always teetering between lucidity and delirium, which I understood to be the literal trick to force the reader into complicity with uncertainty. The novel sometimes become too much of a performance of consciousness unDer siege for me.

Krasznahorkai operates in the register of apocalypse, which is not a genre I enjoy. I don’t particularly like novels of internalised apocalypse, which is why I was wonderfully surprised to have liked All the Devils Are Here. I think is because with Seabrook character the pending apocalypse is the mental weather of the fugitive mind going mad, unaware of it, rather than performing it. There are echoes of Kafka’s The Trial, in both books (am not a Kafka fan either), where the persecuted never meet their prosecutors, and so have to take succour in relentless monologues.

As a classist, I liked how Krasznahorkai fuses the character’s interior panic with Homeric myth, making him into a fugitive and a modern Odysseus, endlessly circling the Aegean of thought. The reference to swans, a word that slips out “for no reason” on the first sentence is not accidental; it gestures toward the classical world that has vanished, the realm of beauty and measure, replaced now by endless pursuit and fragmentation.

The novel’s experimental structure deepens this effect. Each chapter is accompanied by a sketch and QR codes, linking to the percussive soundscape of Miklós Szilveszter as some kind of heartbeat, or a sonic paranoia that mirrors the text’s obsessive rhythm. The collaboration is not decorative but essential in that it restores to reading the physical pulse of fear. One feels the breath shortening, the senses sharpening, as the narrator insists, “I can sense with absolute certainty if they’ve gotten any closer.” The reader becomes the hunted too.

What I liked on the book is that beneath the veneer of terror, there is something elegiac, and the fugitive is also a poet of attention. In a world where nothing can be trusted, awareness itself becomes sacred to him. His paranoia is a perverse form of devotion, the vigilance of one who refuses to let the world slip away. Chasing Homer’s refusal to resolve anything is its strength and bane. The book is neither thriller nor allegory, but a sustained act of existential witnessing. It ends as it begins, in motion, without destination, leaving us with the sense that we too are being pursued, if not by men with knives but by the accelerating noise of our own age: the endless data, the media headlines, the encroaching hum of history and repetitive wars of greed, etc. Krasznahorkai, like his fugitive character, runs through the ruins of modernity, chased by his own consciousness.

I think we can safely say that Chasing Homer is a book about survival through thought. To read it is to inhabit a texture of fear, stretched to philosophical limit. Few writers today make such demands on the reader; fewer still sometimes successfully reward them with such terrible, lucid beautiful prose. Krasznahorkai is a cartographer of the hunted mind, chronicler of the endless flight from meaning and toward it. This is why I look forward to taking up one of his books again.