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Animalinside (ÁllatVanBent)

An extraordinary novella created in collaboration with the painter Max Neumann.

As if some chained being had to shake its essence free, as if art taken to its limit were a form of howling, Animalinside explodes from its first line: "He wants to break free, attempts to stretch open the walls, but he has been tautened by them, and there he remains in this tautening, in this constraint, and there is nothing to do but howl. . . ." Beginning with one of Max Neumann’s paintings, this is a combination of thirteen texts by the author and an additional fourteen images by the artist.  It has been published in English by Sylph Editions and the Cahiers Series of the American University of Paris with an introduction by Colm Toibin, and a limited edition was released by New Directions in the US.

'Krasznahorkai’s most recent work in English is not a novel but a collaboration between the writer and the German artist Max Neumann. Animalinside is a series of fourteen exquisite and enigmatic paintings, with paragraph-length texts by Krasznahorkai . . . . The pleasure of the book flows from its extraordinary, stretched, self-recoiling sentences, which are marvels of a loosely punctuated stream of consciousness' - James Wood The New Yorker

'Animalinside is a series of short texts that alternate with paintings by Max Neumann. . . . The resulting chapbook is a rolling, menacing howl that sounds like the supplication of a pet at one moment and erupts into the fury of a savage beast the next' - London Review of Books

Translated by Ottilie Mulzet

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