I must confess, I am something of a literary philistine. So, when I heard this week that László Krasznahorkai had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, I had no idea who he was. 

Intrigued, I discovered this Hungarian novelist writes apocalyptic fiction about worlds in decay. His works are monuments to despair and existential futility. That naturally appeals to me as a German-born economist. 

But what truly caught my attention was his extraordinary style: Krasznahorkai crafts vast, unbroken sentences that stretch for pages. One of his novels consists of a single, relentless sentence that never pauses for breath. 

Perhaps this technique might lend some gravitas to my own writing?  

I decided to give it a go and asked myself: “Why did the chicken cross the road?” Here goes: 

For to even ask why the chicken crossed the road is to reveal a profound and pitiable misunderstanding of the universe, a desperate human need to impose a narrative of purpose onto what is only a blind, mechanical spasm of existence, as if this creature – this pathetic collection of mud-caked feathers and twitching sinew, its eyes like beads of black glass reflecting a perpetually overcast sky – were an agent of its own destiny, making a conscious choice to abandon the familiar desolation of the muddy verge on one side for the presumed sanctuary of the other, when in fact it was driven not by hope but by an inexorable, neurological compulsion, a mindless glitch in its primitive wiring that commanded it to move, to simply go, launching its frail body into the path of roaring, indifferent machines that slice through the landscape like thunderous apparitions, their passage leaving behind only a brief shudder in the air and the stench of burnt fuel, a chaotic gauntlet through which it scrambled not with courage but with the sheer, witless momentum of a thing that cannot comprehend its own annihilation, its every frantic step a testament to the utter absence of reason in a world that offers only the illusion of destinations; and so it crosses, it endures this meaningless, harrowing transit across the black gash on the face of the earth, surviving the shadow of oblivion by sheer, dumb luck, only to arrive, trembling and exhausted, on the other side – a place that is, upon inspection, identical in every conceivable detail to the one it has just fled: the same grey mud, the same dying weeds, the same oppressive silence. 

I await Stockholm’s call.