fiction

László Krasznahorkai is only the second Hungarian to be awarded the Nobel prize in literature. He follows Imre Kertész (1929–2016), whose best-known book outside Hungary is Fatelessness – an account based on the author’s experience as a teenage prisoner in Auschwitz. When the fifteen-year-old protagonist is liberated and returns home, he finds that nobody truly understands what has happened. Words have become detached from their meaning.

Fatelessness was written at some point in the 1960s, but it could not be published until 1975, and it received its first English translation in 1992. The Nobel prize would come a decade later. By then, Kertész’s writing had changed. The clear, open prose of his early book had been replaced by a closer, denser form of writing.

Krasznahorkai’s own first book, Satantango (1985) – which he assumed to be his last – was published when he was thirty-one. It was a great success in its first German translation, in 1990, but it was his next full novel, The Melancholy of Resistance (1989), that won the Bestenliste prize in Germany and that was his first to appear in English (in 1998, in my translation).

As well as in Germany, Krasznahorkai was launched, in a small way, in England and the US. The Melancholy of Resistance received very good but generally very short reviews, and the author developed a reputation among what used to be referred to as “discriminating readers”. War and War followed in 1999 (2006 in English, in my translation), and it was not until 2012 that Satantango appeared in English (also in my translation). This was Krasznahorkai’s miracle moment, when the floodgates of praise opened up in the anglophone world – a moment akin to the “discovery” of Austerlitz in 2001, the year of W. G. Sebald’s death. As with Sebald, the commendations were led by Susan Sontag and James Wood.

Sebald had, in fact, written the blurb for my translation of The Melancholy of Resistance:

This is a book about a world into which the Leviathan has returned. The universality of its vision rivals that of Gogol’s Dead Souls and far surpasses all the lesser concerns of contemporary writing.

Sebald and Krasznahorkai, both central Europeans of mid-century vintage, share a melancholy vision of the world, verging on despair. I introduced them to each other at the University of East Anglia shortly after the original publication of The Melancholy of Resistance, when Krasznahorkai came to take part in a series of readings and conversations. His English was halting at the time, and we found ourselves developing an almost comic dialogue in terms of timing. Few people comment on the sense of humour in his books, but it is certainly there. (The same goes for Sebald, if to a lesser degree.)

Krasznahorkai’s world is one of flowing words, endless sentences, endless paragraphs. Sometimes a single sentence might be enough. Pages flow gradually into each other in a continuum, the intricacy and momentum of the prose all but overwhelming us in its slow advance, like lava creeping over a landscape. Satantango was published in the dying years of the Soviet empire, when everything was austere and corrupt and seemed to be on its last legs. To comprehend this, to capture it, was a mammoth task. Krasznahorkai’s main Hungarian contemporaries, Péter Nádas (b. 1942) and Péter Eszterházy (1950–2016) had their own ways – Nádas through the amplification of memory and experience, Eszterházy through playful postmodernist adventures with language. Absurdity, instability and despair haunt the central European consciousness of the twentieth century, and Krasznahorkai’s provincial world is plunged deeply into it.

Satantango is set among the community of a dying co-operative farm in a backwards society left without hope or entertainment. There is only the pub where the drunken tango of the title takes place. The Melancholy of Resistance unfolds in a similar milieu, but in a small town rather than a village. The monstrous power of authoritarianism is set against the monstrous power of anarchy and destruction in the form of the enormous dead whale that goes on show in the town’s main square. War and War, by contrast, opens in a decaying city. A curator discovers a mystical text that takes him first to a chaotic and dangerous New York, then to Cologne, then Switzerland, in search of the meaning of the manuscript. Things do not end well.

By the time of War and War’s appearance in English, Krasznahorkai had become closely linked with the Hungarian film director Béla Tarr, his exact contemporary. The pair have so far collaborated on a sequence of seven films that includes Sátántangó (1994), Werckmeister Harmonies (2000; adapted from The Melancholy of Resistance) and The Turin Horse (2011). The films, like the books, have developed a cult following. Often long, patient, austere and beautiful, shot in black-and-white, they complement the novels’ style and pacing. Tarr’s Sátántangó runs to more than seven hours. Werckmeister Harmonies, although it dispenses with a large chunk of the book on which it is based, still occupies close to 150 minutes. Krasznahorkai and Tarr have formed, as Sebald might have put it, a joint leviathan.

The legacies of Dostoevsky, Gogol and Kafka, along with Robert Walser and Thomas Bernhard, stalk the historical and psychological territory from which Krasznahorkai has emerged with his own original, gigantic, idiosyncratic constructions. The slow, remorseless disintegration of self, society and the physical body of the universe is his major theme, as seen not just in the novels, but in his novellas, short stories and miscellaneous writings, including Animalinside (2010; 2011 in English) The Last Wolf (2009; 2016), The Bill (2010; 2013) and many more. All inhabit the same realm, at an advanced stage of collapse. It was for this reason Sontag dubbed Krasznahorkai “the master of the apocalypse”.

Nevertheless, there is in both War and War and many of the later books an attempt to find a secret world of order. It is there in the mysterious text read by the archivist in War and War; and it can even be discerned in Melancholy’s Eszter, the music scholar who searches for perfect natural tuning in an untuned world. In a conversation following the anglophone publication of Satantango, shortly after which, out of exhaustion, I stopped translating Krasznahorkai’s longer work and his current main translator, Ottilie Mulzet, took over, I asked him, “Where next?” He said he wanted to write a book without human characters at all.

An attempt to envision a more harmonious schematic world, all but stripped of humans, had already been made in 2003, in A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East, which finally appeared in English in 2022. (It was while I was in the middle of translating this book that I handed over the reins to the remarkable Mulzet, hence the delay.) Set in Japan, it is Krasznahorkai’s most serene work, focusing on the garden of a monastery in Kyoto. Here, too, there are ugly disruptions, in the form of various animal deaths, but the prose constantly reaches deep into the subsoil and out towards eternity.

Seiobo There Below (2008; 2013), set variously between Japan, Spain, Athens and medieval Florence, continues the quest for perfection, taking the form of a series of stories that follow various artists as they pursue their craft. Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming (2016; 2019) takes us back to Hungary. Here, our protagonist, the Baron, buries himself, like Eszter in The Melancholy of Resistance, in an obscure field of study – mosses – hoping to detach himself from the world. Herscht 07769 (2021; 2024), the author’s most recent novel to appear in English, is more of an adventure, involving a criminal obsessed with Bach. It unfolds over one enormous sentence. A new novel, Zsömle odavan (2024), has yet to appear in translation.

Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming did not just mark a return to Hungary, but to the author’s presiding themes and obsessions. In his words: “With this novel I can prove that I really wrote just one book in my life. This is the book – Satantango, Melancholy, War and War, and Baron. This is my one book”. This “one” book presents a vision of the world as corrupted and doomed, as it rolls towards its inevitable destruction. Yet there is an undeniable majesty in the way it goes about this. It is for this majesty, I suspect, that László Krasznahorkai has been awarded the Nobel prize.

George Szirtes is a poet and translator. His most recent book of poems is Fresh Out of the Sky, 2021.

Hello! In the spirit of Halloween, I wanted to see if anyone had some recommendations for good horror books?!

Open to new and classic books. I’ve read quite a bit of Stephen King already. Some classics like Dracula, Turn of the Screw, Shirley Jackson books, etc. Exorcist is probably the scariest book I’ve read.

What else should I try?