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Recursive Voyeurism

Michael Hayward

The Manhattan Project (Sylph Editions), described as a “literary diary,” is a slim hardcover in which the Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai (author of Sátántangó, and frequent collaborator with the Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr) “chronicles his attempts to fathom the life of Herman Melville.” During the period covered by The Manhattan Project Krasznahorkai was on a fellowship at New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, ostensibly “working on a novel about Melville after the publication of Moby Dick.” Krasznahorkai’s attempts at research are regularly side-tracked by the ghosts of those who have walked earlier versions of the same Manhattan streets: the poet Allen Ginsberg, the visionary architect Lebbeus Woods, and the author Malcolm Lowry, who lived in Manhattan for a while during the 193s, and who was also obsessed with Melville’s time in that city (Lowry’s Manhattan experiences later formed the basis for his novella Lunar Caustic). The Manhattan Project is illustrated with black and white photographs by Ornan Rotem, who observes in an afterword that “Every place you’ve ever been, someone else has been before you.” Reading The Manhattan Project makes you feel a bit like a voyeur, or the latest in a long, recursive sequence of noir literary detectives, each following the faint traces of their predecessors.

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