László Krasznahorkai and Contemporary Europe’s Perilous Reality

In 2011 I wrote that reading László Krasznahorkay “is a bit like seeing a group of people standing in a circle in a town square, apparently warming their hands by a fire, only to come closer to discover that there is no fire and that they are not gathering around anything at all.” For many ordinary readers, the idea of ​​entering a fictional world constantly teeters on the edge of a revelation that is always inevitable but hidden, in which words float around incessantly around reference, and whose favorite tool is long, continuous sentences that take up, say, four one hundred the pages to be uncovered may represent—well, it may represent exactly the kind of oscillating madness that Krasznagorkai has written so brilliantly and sympathetically for so many years. This may represent what he called “reality taken to the point of madness.”

At that time, only two Krasnagorkai novels were available in English…Melancholy of resistance” And “War and war“, which was published in Hungarian in 1989 and 1999 respectively. Krasznahorkai was already a European phenomenon, especially in Germany, where he lived and where much of his work was translated. There it was common to hear him mentioned as a likely future Nobel laureate, but since there was so little information in English, such rumors had the status of palace gossip. Nevertheless, The Melancholy of Resistance was promoted as superior to samizdat. It was Hungarian; it had a magnificent, mournfully majestic title (consciously hinting both at the importance of resistance and at its inevitable exhaustion); and he received praise from W. H. Sebald and Susan Sontag.

Besides the two translated books, there were others, tantalizing glimpses of others. Krasnagorskaya's debut novel “Satanic“” from 1985 was still not in English, but you could watch Béla Tarr's seven-hour film of the same name, adapted from the novel. (Krasznahorkai wrote the screenplays for six of Tarr's films.) I watched perhaps two hours of “Satantango,” but until the English translation of the poet George Szirtes finally appeared, I could only imagine the convoluted but clear sentences that Tarr's long tracking shots seemed to be trying hard to emulate the cinema:

The doctor sat at the window, gloomy, with his shoulder pressed against the cold, damp wall, and he did not even need to move his head to look through the gap between the dirty flower curtain inherited from his mother and the rotten window frame to see the estate, and he only had to take his eyes off the book, take a quick glance to note the slightest change, and if it happened every now and then – let's say, not at all he became lost in thought, or because he concentrated his attention on one of the most remote points of the estate – that his eyes were missing something, his extremely keen hearing immediately came to his aid, although he rarely thought and even more rarely rose in his winter coat with a fur collar from a heavily stuffed, blanket-stuffed chair, the position of which was precisely determined by the cumulative experience of his daily activities, successfully bringing to minimize the number of possible cases in which he would have to leave his observation post at the window.

English-speaking readers began to catch up as a stream of remarkable translations appeared, confirming Krasnagorkai's mastery: “Seyobo down there(2013), “Return of Baron Wenckheim to his homeland(2019), and, most recently, “Herd 07769(2024) is probably the most accessible of his novels. (All of the recent fiction has been translated into smooth, meandering English by the superb Canadian translator Ottilie Mulzet.) Each is an unusual and unique work, and each expands Krasznahorkai's range. The Homecoming of Baron Wenckheim, for example, presents a tragicomic, quixotic confrontation between the disillusioned and xenophobic inhabitants of a dilapidated provincial Hungarian town and the returning émigré nobleman, the titular Baron Bela Wenckheim, on whom they pinned their (often reactionary) hopes. But the returning aristocrat is a desperate spendthrift and will find neither refuge nor redemption among his quarreling and kindred compatriots. The novel reminds us of how funny Krasnagorkai can be. “Eternity will last as long as it lasts” is a funny epigraph of the novel.

Yet in some ways these two early novels, which I read back in 2011, set the tone for much of the later work: the unstable politics of small towns in Hungary and the former East Germany (nationalists, neo-Nazis, law-and-order traditionalists); an alarming sense of impending apocalypse, both political and metaphysical; and Krasznahorkai's love for obsessive dreamers and holy fools (the world's moss expert, an archivist who is convinced he has discovered a long-forgotten manuscript and who travels to New York to tell the world about it, a pianist obsessed with well-tempered piano tuning). Despite appearances to the contrary—the jumbled sentences, the feverish mind—there is nothing hermetic about Krasnagorkai's work, both old and new, which confronts contemporary European reality and its dangers head-on, including the wrenching dynamics of settlement, movement, and identity.