"Realty is no obstacle," reads the epigraph to our Book of the Week, Spadework for a Palace: Entering the madness of others by László Krasznahorkai (translated by John Batki), a single, book-length, wonderfully hysterical sentence pouring from the mind of a seemingly unremarkable librarian obsessed with his near-namesake Herman Melville, with the psychogeography of their shared part of New York, and with his dream of building a Permanently Closed Library that would isolate and protect his selective version of the world from the realities and that would otherwise dissolve it.  
>>A box built in the abyss.
>>Krasznahorkai on the trail of Melville. 
>>Archive fever. 
>>The narrator becomes obsessed with the apocalyptic architecture of Lebbeus Woods... 

>>And with the work of Bela Bartók...
>>And with Malcolm Lowry's drunken stalking of Melville's ghost to the point of madness, as described in Lunar Caustic.  
>>The real windowless building (with a sinister use) where the narrator would like to house his locked library. 
>>Obsession and goodwill. 
>>Other books by Krasznahorkai. 
>>The excellent 'Storybook ND' series. 
>>Your copy of Spadework for a Palace.