László Krasznahorkai and Contemporary Europe’s Perilous Reality

In 2011, I wrote that reading László Krasznahorkai “is a little like seeing a group of people standing in a circle in a town square, apparently warming their hands at a fire, only to discover, as one gets closer, that there is no fire, and that they are gathered around nothing at all.” For many ordinary readers, the idea of entering a fictional world constantly teetering on the edge of a revelation that is always imminent but concealed, in which words pace ceaselessly around reference, and whose favored tool is the long, unstopped sentence, one that takes, say, four hundred pages to unfurl, might constitute—well, it might constitute precisely the kind of teetering insanity that Krasznahorkai has written so brilliantly and sympathetically about, for so many years. It might constitute what he has called “reality examined to the point of madness.”

Back then, only two of Krasznahorkai’s novels were available in English—“The Melancholy of Resistance” and “War and War,” which had been published in Hungarian in 1989 and 1999, respectively. Krasznahorkai was already a European phenomenon, especially in Germany, where he was living and where most of his work had been translated. There it was common to hear him described as a likely future Nobel laureate, but, with so little to go on in English, such rumors had the status of palace gossip. Still, “The Melancholy of Resistance” got handed round like superior samizdat. It was Hungarian; it had a superb, mournfully grandiloquent title (hinting knowingly at both the importance of resistance and its inevitable exhaustion); and it carried praise from W. G. Sebald and Susan Sontag.

Beyond the two translated books, there were tantalizing glimpses of others. Krasznahorkai’s début novel, “Sátántangó,” from 1985, still wasn’t in English, but one could watch Béla Tarr’s seven-hour movie of the same title, adapted from the novel. (Krasznahorkai has written scripts for six of Tarr’s films.) I had watched maybe two hours of “Sátántangó” but, until the English translation, by the poet George Szirtes, finally appeared, I could only imagine the coiled yet lucid run-on sentences that Tarr’s long tracking shots were presumably doing their cinematic best to emulate:

The doctor was sitting by the window feeling morose, his shoulder up against the cold, damp wall and he didn’t even have to move his head to look through the gap between the dirty floral curtain inherited from his mother and the rotten window frame in order to see the estate, but had only to raise his eyes from his book, take a brief glance to note the slightest change and if it now and then happened—say if he was utterly lost in thought or because he had focused on one of the remotest points of the estate—that his eyes missed something, his exceedingly sharp ears immediately came to his aid, though it was rare for him to be lost in thought and rarer still for him to rise in his fur-collared winter coat from the heavily blanketed, stuffed armchair—its position precisely determined by the cumulative experience of his everyday activities, successfully reducing to a minimum the number of possible occasions on which he would have to leave his observation post by the window.

Anglophone readers were starting to catch up, as a torrent of great work arrived in translation, confirming Krasznahorkai’s mastery: “Seiobo There Below” (2013), “Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming” (2019), and, most recently, “Herscht 07769” (2024), probably the most accessible of his novels. (All of the recent fiction has been rendered in fluid, sinuous English by the superb Canadian translator Ottilie Mulzet.) Each is an extraordinary and singular work, and each expands Krasznahorkai’s range. “Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming,” for instance, stages a tragicomic, quixotic confrontation between the frustrated and xenophobic inhabitants of a dilapidated provincial Hungarian town and a returning émigré nobleman, the Baron Béla Wenckheim of the title, in whom they have placed their (often reactionary) hopes. But the returning aristocrat is a clapped-out wastrel, and will find no refuge or redemption from his squabbling and inbred countrymen. The novel reminds us of how funny Krasznahorkai can be. “Eternity—will last as long as it lasts” is the novel’s droll epigraph.

Yet, in some ways, those two early novels that I read back in 2011 establish the peculiar atmosphere of much of the later work: the precarious politics of small towns in Hungary and the former East Germany (nativists, neo-Nazis, law-and-order traditionalists); an uneasy sense of impending apocalypse, both political and metaphysical; and Krasznahorkai’s fondness for visionary obsessives and holy fools (a world expert on mosses, 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 the well-tempered tuning of the piano). Despite appearances to the contrary—the swirling sentences, the feverish intellection—there is nothing hermetic about Krasznahorkai’s work, both old and new, which squarely faces contemporary European reality and its perils, including the tortured dynamics of settlement, movement, and identity.