The baron returns to the small Hungarian town of his birth, fleeing enormous gambling debts accrued in Argentina. (It is there in the title, the child Estike having poisoned herself on the grounds of Wenckheim Castle in Satantango.) The eponymous protagonist is the latest in Krasznahorkai’s long line of Myshkin-like innocents, beings of great purity who nonetheless hasten death and destruction. Baron Wenckheim absorbs energies from these other novels. This is my one book.įour books that make up one book, then a kind of purgatorial gestalt. This is the book- Satantango, Melancholy, War and War, and Baron. With this novel I can prove that I really wrote just one book in my life. I wasn’t satisfied with the second, so I wrote the third, and so on. I wasn’t satisfied with the first, and that’s why I wrote the second. I’ve said it a thousand times that I always wanted to write just one book. It represents, as the author recently told The Paris Review in his Art of Fiction interview, the conclusion of a tetralogy: It is, as Michael Hofmann says of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, “more world than product,” a planetary concretion of energy and motion, and subject to its own eventual heat death.īaron Wenckheim’s Homecoming is the latest Krasznahorkai novel to reach English readers, in a typically extraordinary translation from Ottilie Mulzet.

Here is fiction that collapses into minute strangeness and explodes into vast cosmology. There are the sudden, demonic accelerations the extraordinary leaps in intensity the gorgeous derangements of consciousness the muddy villages of Mitteleuropa the abyssal laughter the pervasive sense of a choleric god waiting patiently just offstage. But the extravagant disintegration and sly mischief of the work make him difficult to mistake for anyone else. Many of his literary signatures-compulsive monologue, apocalyptic egress, terminal gloom-are recognizably Late Modern. The epic length of a Krasznahorkai sentence slowly erodes its own reality, clause by scouring clause, until at last it releases the terrible darkness harbored at its core. His novels-equal parts artful attenuation and digressive deluge-suggest a Beckettian impulse overwhelmed by obsessive proclivities. The playful, pessimistic fictions of the Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai emit a recognizably entropic music. Read our Art of Fiction interview with László Krasznahorkai in the Summer 2018 issue By Dustin Illingworth SeptemArchive of Longing

Satantango laszlo krasznahorkai