The Bill: For Palma Vecchio, at Venice

In The Bill, László Krasznahorkai’s madly lucid voice pours forth in a single, vertiginous, eleven-page sentence addressing Palma Vecchio, a sixteenth-century Venetian painter. Peering out from the pages are Vecchio’s voluptuous, bare-breasted blondes, a succession of models transformed on the canvas into portraits of apprehensive sexuality. Alongside these women, the writer that Susan Sontag called “the Hungarian master of apocalypse” interrogates Vecchio’s gift: Why does he do it? How doe...