Laszlo Krasznahorkai and the perilous reality of contemporary Europe

In 2011, she wrote that reading Laszlo Krasznahorkai “is a bit like seeing a group of people standing in a circle in a town square, warming their hands over a fire, only to discover, as one approaches, that there is no fire, and that they are huddled around nothing at all.” For many ordinary readers, the idea of ​​entering a fantasy world constantly teeters on the edge of a revelation that is always imminent but hidden, where words move ceaselessly around the referent, and whose preferred device is the long, non-stop sentence, which takes, say, four hundred The pages that need to be published might constitute—well, they might constitute exactly the kind of swinging madness that Krasnahorkai has written about so brilliantly and sympathetically, for so many years. It may constitute what he called “reality examined to the point of madness.”

At that time, only two of Krasznahorkai’s novels were available in English –The sadness of resistance“and”War and war“, which were published in Hungarian in 1989 and 1999, respectively. Krasnahorkai was already a European phenomenon, especially in Germany, where he lived and where most of his works were translated. There it was common to hear him described as a likely future Nobel Prize winner, but with little to say in English, such rumors were palace gossip. Nevertheless, “The Melancholy of Resistance” circulated. Like presidents. Samizdat. She was Hungarian. It had a brilliant, cheerful, melancholy title (deliberately indicating the importance of resistance and its inevitable exhaustion); It has received praise from W.G. Sebald and Susan Sontag.

Aside from the two translated books, there were exciting glimpses into other books. Krasnahorkai’s first novel, “Satantangofrom 1985, was not in English, but one could watch Béla Tarr’s seven-hour film of the same title, adapted from the novel. (Krasnahorkai wrote the screenplays for six of Tarr’s films.) I had watched “Sátántangó” for about two hours, but until the English translation by poet George Szirtes finally appeared, I could only imagine The convoluted, obvious sentences that Tarr’s long takes were supposedly doing their best to emulate in the film:

The doctor was sitting by the window feeling gloomy, with his shoulder raised against the cold, damp wall. He did not even have to move his head to look through the gap between the dirty pink curtain he had inherited from his mother and the rotten window frame to see the property, but he only had to raise his eyes from his book, and glance quickly to notice the slightest change and whether it had occurred now and then – for example For example, if he was completely lost in his thoughts or because he focused on one of the farthest points in the book. – That his eyes missed something, and his very sharp ears immediately came to his aid, although it was rare for him to be lost in his thoughts, and even rarer for him to rise in his fur-collared winter coat from the chair stuffed with a heavy blanket – His position was precisely determined by the cumulative experience of his daily activities, which succeeded in reducing the number of possible occasions on which he would have to leave the center Surveillance by the window is kept to a minimum.

English-speaking readers began to catch up, with a stream of wonderful works in translation arriving, confirming Krasznahorkai’s mastery: “Seiobo there below(2013)Baron Winkheim’s Homecoming(2019), and more recently,Hirscht 07769(2024), perhaps his most accessible novel. (All the recent novels are rendered in smooth, meandering English by the great Canadian translator Ottilie Molzet.) Each work is exceptional and unique, and each expands the scope of Krasznahorkai. “Baron Weinckheim’s Homecoming,” for example, stages a tragic and imaginative confrontation between the disillusioned and xenophobic population of A run-down rural Hungarian town and a returning immigrant nobleman, the titular Baron Béla Winkheim, in whom they place their (often reactionary) hopes. But the returning aristocrat is a prodigal, and will find no refuge or salvation from his quarreling and entrenched countrymen. The novel reminds us how funny Krasznahorkai can be. “Eternity – it will last as long as it lasts” It is the funny phrase in the novel.

And yet, in some ways, these two early novels that I read in 2011 establish the strange atmosphere of much of the later work: the fraught politics of small-town Hungary and the former East Germany (immigrant apologists, neo-Nazis, law-and-order traditionalists); An uncomfortable feeling of impending apocalypse, both political and metaphysical; and Krasznahorkai’s penchant for visionary nerds and holy fools (a world expert on algae, an archivist convinced he’s discovered a long-forgotten manuscript and travels to New York to tell the world about it, a pianist obsessed with good piano tuning). Despite appearances to the contrary—swirling sentences, feverish thought—there is nothing hermetic about Krasznahorkai’s work, both old and new, that squarely confronts contemporary European reality and its perils, including the tormenting dynamics of settlement, movement, and identity.