One of the greatest things about literary prizes, whether local or international, is that it introduces readers to incredible works they might not have read or heard of before. This is true in the case of the 2015 Man Booker International Prize winner, at least for me. However, upon investigation, it seems I owe a great debt to the panel of judges for bringing Hungarian László Krasznahorkai’s translated oeuvre into my life.
Sentences so long they sometimes covers entire chapters. A lava flow of words. Magisterial. Melancholic and brilliant. Fiction as epiphany. Surpassing all the lesser concerns of contemporary writing.
This is how his readers have described the work of the enigmatic Krasznahorkai. In the press release published by the MBI conveners after the announcement, he is described as “the perfect international writer”:
László Krasznahorkai is the perfect international writer for the Man Booker International Prize. Born in Hungary, the 61-year-old Krasznahorkai has lived and worked in Germany, Mongolia, China, Japan and New York (living in Allen Ginsberg’s apartment), so he has seen a bit of the world. His admirers, from the late WG Sebald to Susan Sontag, are similarly diverse. His writing meanwhile is equally hard to pin down. The phrases used by Dame Marina Warner when she announced him as the winner of the £60,000 prize suggested something of his complexity: ‘an absurdist who shows no pity’, a writer of works that are ‘often piercingly beautiful’, and of ‘fiction as epiphany’, a man who represents ‘a unique weave of thoughts and words and sensibility’, a writer who is ‘gallows humorous and surprisingly light footed’. A tricky chap to get a handle on then.
When asked recently how he would describe his works to someone unfamiliar with them, Krasznahorkai responded: ‘Letters; then from letters, words; then from these words, some short sentences; then more sentences that are longer, and in the main very long sentences, for the duration of 35 years. Beauty in language. Fun in hell.’ This definition, both playful and accurate, can be seen in the comma-less first sentence of his best-known novel, Satantango: ‘One morning near the end of October not long before the first drops of the mercilessly long autumn rains began to fall on the cracked and saline soil on the western side of the estate (later the stinking yellow sea of mud would render footpaths impassable and put the town too beyond reach) Futaki woke to hear bells.’
An equally good example, if only Krasznahorkai would publish it, would be his winner’s speech at the award ceremony. Long-term attendees at prize events have heard speeches take many forms, from the short and stumbling and the rambling and inclusive to the humorous and self depreciating, Krasznahorkai’s took the form of a recitation and an incantation. In looking back at all those who had inspired or helped him as a writer he name-checked a bewildering array of figures great and small. His first teacher of Latin and Greek was mentioned (now, in Krasznahorkai’s repeated ritualistic phrase, ‘no longer among the ranks of the living’); his first wife too (who was, apparently, quick to point out when his writing was no good); Dostoevsky and his literary hero Kafka were honoured; Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Nick Cave had their moment alongside JS Bach; Krasznahorkai’s second wife too, naturally; the critic James Wood and W.G. Sebald (‘no longer among the ranks of the living’) and a host of others. As Krasznahorkai writes elsewhere in Satantango, ‘jokes are just like life. Things that begin badly, end badly. Everything’s fine in the middle, it’s the end you need to worry about.’ No need to worry here though: as he went, ticking off those still among the ranks of the living and those not, the audience was visibly delighted by the wit, flow and novelty of the performance (and it was a performance). If only all such speeches could be as good.
An acceptance speech may be an odd way to approach an unfamiliar writer but in the case of Krasznahorkai and his unique, complicated, flavoursome fictional world, conjured up (in Edwin Frank’s wonderful phrase), in sentences of incredible length that go to incredible lengths, it seems oddly appropriate. But the only way really to see why the Man Booker International judges chose him is to read him.
After the announcement Krasznahorkai spoke to BBC’s Nkem Ifekika about his life, his inspirations and most importantly, his writing. In response to a question about his flowing, long sentences he says: “The short sentences are absolute artificial”. He goes on: “You, my sweet reader, you think without short sentences. You think everything in your life, every moment, without dots, only commas commas after commas.”
Listen to the podcast of the interview, in which the author also shares his thoughts on the international attention brought on by a prize like this:
More links to interviews, reactions and reflections on MBI win:
Krasznahorkai’s website is an incredible resource, rich with information and links. Visit it to find out more about this multiple award-winning author:
Find out more about Krasznahorkai’s books, published in English by New Directions:
Beauty, in László Krasznahorkai’s new novel, reflects, however fleeting, the sacred — even if we are mostly unable to bear it.
In Seiobo There Below we see the goddess Seiobo returning to mortal realms in search of perfection. An ancient Buddha being restored; Perugino managing his workshop; a Japanese Noh actor rehearsing; a fanatic of Baroque music lecturing to a handful of old villagers; tourists intruding into the rituals of Japan’s most sacred shrine; a heron hunting.… Seiobo overs over it all, watching closely.
Melancholic and brilliant, Seiobo There Below urges us to treasure the concentration that goes into the perception of great art, leading us to re-examine our connection to immanence.
Published September 24th, 2013
Read an excerpt from Seiobo There Below:
KAMO-HUNTER
Everything around it moves, as if just this one time and one time only, as if the message of Heraclitus has arrived here through some deep current, from the distance of an entire universe, in spite of all the senseless obstacles, because the water moves, it flows, it arrives, and cascades; now and then the silken breeze sways, the mountains quiver in the scourging heat, but this heat itself also moves, trembles, and vibrates in the land, as do the tall scattered grass-islands, the grass, blade by blade, in the riverbed; each individual shallow wave, as it falls, tumbles over the low weirs, and then, every inconceivable fleeting element of this subsiding wave, and all the individual glitterings of light flashing on the surface of this fleeting element, this surface suddenly emerging and just as quickly collapsing, with its drops of light dying down, scintillating, and then reeling in all directions, inexpressible in words; clouds are gathering; the restless, jarring blue sky high above; the sun is concentrated with horrific strength, yet still indescribable, extending onto the entire momentary creation, maddeningly brilliant, blindingly radiant; the fish and the frogs and the beetles and the tiny reptiles are in the river; the cars and the buses, from the northbound number 3 to the number 32 up to the number 38, inexorably creep along on the steaming asphalt roads built parallel on both embankments, then the rapidly propelled bicycles below the breakwaters, the men and women strolling next to the river along paths that were built or inscribed into the dust, and the blocking stones, too, set down artificially and asymmetrically underneath the mass of gliding water: everything is at play or alive, so that things happen, move on, dash along, proceed forward, sink down, rise up, disappear, emerge again, run and flow and rush somewhere, only it, the Ooshirosagi, does not move at all, this enormous snow-white bird, open to attack by all, not concealing its defenselessness; this hunter, it leans forward, its neck folded in an S-form, and it now extends its head and long hard beak out from this S-form, and strains the whole, but at the same time it is strained downward, its wings pressed tightly against its body, its thin legs searching for a firm point beneath the water’s surface; it fixes its gaze on the flowing surface of the water, the surface, yes, while it sees, crystal-clear, what lies beneath this surface, down below in the refractions of light, however rapidly it may arrive, if it does arrive, if it ends up there, if a fish, a frog, a beetle, a tiny reptile arrives with the water that gurgles as the flow is broken and foams up again, with one single precise and quick movement, the bird shall strike with its beak, and lift something up, it’s not even possible to see what it is, everything happens with such lightning speed, it’s not possible to see, only to know that it is a fish — an amago, an ayu, a huna, a kamotsuka, a mugitsuku or an unagi or something else — and that is why it stood there, almost in the middle of the Kamo River, in the shallow water; and there it stands, in one time, immeasurable in its passing, and yet beyond all doubt extant, one time proceeding neither forward nor backward, but just swirling and moving nowhere, like an inconceivably complex net, cast out into time; and this motionlessness, despite all its strength, must be born and sustained, and it would only be fitting to grasp this simultaneously, but it is precisely that, this simultaneous grasping, that cannot be realized, so it remains unsaid, and even the entirety of the words that want to describe it do not appear, not even the separate words; yet still the bird must lean upon one single moment all at once, and in doing so, must obstruct all movement: all alone, within its own self, in the frenzy of events, in the exact center of an absolute, swarming, teeming world, it must remain there in this cast-out moment, so that this moment as it were closes down upon it, and then the moment is closed, so that the bird may bring its snow-white body to a dead halt in the exact center of this furious movement, so that it may impress its own motionlessness against the dreadful forces breaking over it from all directions, because what comes only much later is that once again it will take part in this furious motion, in the total frenzy of everything, and it too will move, in a lightning-quick strike, together with everything else; for now, however, it remains within this enclosing moment, at the beginning of the hunt.
Already famous as the inspiration for the filmmaker Béla Tarr’s six-hour masterpiece, Satantango is proof, as the spellbinding, bleak, and hauntingly beautiful book has it, that “the devil has all the good times.” The story of Satantango, spread over a couple of days of endless rain, focuses on the dozen remaining inhabitants of an unnamed isolated hamlet: failures stuck in the middle of nowhere. Schemes, crimes, infidelities, hopes of escape, and above all trust and its constant betrayal are Krasznahorkai’s meat.
“At the center of Satantango,” George Szirtes has said, “is the eponymous drunken dance, referred to here sometimes as a tango and sometimes as a csardas. It takes place at the local inn where everyone is drunk… Their world is rough and ready, lost somewhere between the comic and tragic, in one small insignificant corner of the cosmos. Theirs is the dance of death.” “You know,” Mrs. Schmidt, a pivotal character, tipsily confides, “dance is my one weakness.”
Published March 5th, 2012
As if some chained being had to shake its essence free, as if art taken to its limit were a form of howling, Animalinside explodes from its first line: “He wants to break free, attempts to stretch open the walls, but he has been tautened by them, and there he remains in this tautening, in this constraint, and there is nothing to do but howl…”
To create this work that strains against all constraints, László Krasznahorkai began from one of Max Neumann’s paintings; Neumann, spurred into action, created 14 more images, which unleashed an additional 13 texts from the author. Animalinside is the rare case of two matchless artists meeting across disciplines, and New Directions is very proud to publish a limited edition of this powerful novella, exquisitely produced by Sylph Editions and the Cahiers Series of the American University of Paris with a deluxe seven-stage printing process for the amazing Neumann images.
Published June 16th, 2011
War and War, László Krasznahorkai’s second novel in English from New Directions, begins at a point of danger: on a dark train platform Korim is on the verge of being attacked by thuggish teenagers and robbed; and from here, we are carried along by the insistent voice of this nervous clerk. Desperate, at times almost mad, but also keenly empathic, Korim has discovered in a small Hungarian town’s archives an antique manuscript of startling beauty: it narrates the epic tale of brothers-in-arms struggling to return home from a disastrous war. Korim is determined to do away with himself, but before he can commit suicide, he feels he must escape to New York with the precious manuscript and commit it to eternity by typing it all on the world-wide web. Following Korim with obsessive realism through the streets of New York (from his landing in a Bowery flophouse to his moving far uptown with a mad interpreter), War and War relates his encounters with a fascinating range of humanity, a world torn between viciousness and mysterious beauty. Following the eight chapters of War and War is a short “prequel acting as a sequel,” “Isaiah,” which brings us to a dark bar, years before in Hungary, where Korim rants against the world and threatens suicide.
Written like nothing else (turning single sentences into chapters), War and War affirms WG Sebald’s comment that Krasznahorkai’s prose “far surpasses all the lesser concerns of contemporary writing.”
Published April 1st, 2006
The Melancholy of Resistance, László Krasznahorkai’s magisterial, surreal novel, depicts a chain of mysterious events in a small Hungarian town. A circus, promising to display the stuffed body of the largest whale in the world, arrives in the dead of winter, prompting bizarre rumors. Word spreads that the circus folk have a sinister purpose in mind, and the frightened citizens cling to any manifestation of order they can find — music, cosmology, fascism. The novel’s characters are unforgettable: the evil Mrs. Eszter, plotting her takeover of the town; her weakling husband; and Valuska, our hapless hero with his head in the clouds, who is the tender center of the book, the only pure and noble soul to be found.
Compact, powerful and intense, The Melancholy of Resistance, as its enormously gifted translator George Szirtes puts it, “is a slow lava flow of narrative, a vast black river of type.” And yet, miraculously, the novel, in the words of The Guardian, “lifts the reader along in lunar leaps and bounds.”
Published June 1st, 2002
Book details
- Seiobo There Below by Laszlo Krasznahorkai
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EAN: 9780811219679
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- Satantango by Laszlo Krasznahorkai
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EAN: 9780811220897
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- Animalinside by Laszlo Krasznahorkai
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EAN: 9780811219167
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- War and War by Laszlo Krasznahorkai
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EAN: 9780811216098
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- The Melancholy of Resistance by Laszlo Krasznahorkai
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EAN: 9780811215046
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