How long does it take to read The World Goes On?
The World Goes On by László Krasznahorkai takes about 5 hours 42 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 5 hours 42 minutes
A weekend read
First published 2013. 311 pages, about 85,525 words.
12 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 9 hours 30 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 5 hours 42 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 34 minutes |
The page count is the median across 6 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
In The World Goes On, a narrator first speaks directly, then tells eleven unforgettable stories, and then bids farewell (“for here I would leave this earth and these stars, because I would take nothing with me”). As László Krasznahoraki himself explains: “Each text is about drawing our attention away from this world, speeding our body toward annihilation, and immersing ourselves in a current of thought or a narrative…” A Hungarian interpreter obsessed with waterfalls, at the edge of the abyss in his own mind, wanders the chaotic streets of Shanghai. A traveler, reeling from the sights and sounds of Varanasi, encounters a giant of a man on the banks of the Ganges ranting on the nature of a single drop of water. A child laborer in a Portuguese marble quarry wanders off from work one day into a surreal realm utterly alien from his daily toils. The World Goes On is another amazing masterpiece by the winner of the 2015 Man Booker International Prize. “The excitement of his writing,” Adam Thirwell proclaimed in the New York Review of Books, “is that he has come up with this own original forms—there is nothing else like it in contemporary literature.”
Subjects: Fiction, short stories (single author), Short stories, Anthologies, Anthology, Fiction, Literary Fiction
