I am putting together this post with the intention of it going online on Halloween. There will probably be more written about Krasznahorkai between now and then. Whatever contribution I make will be of no consequence - unless I get someone wandering in here convinced to read him.
A fellow prisoner gave me a collection Krasznahorkai's short stories while in Fort Dix FCI. Never before had I read anyone quite as wild in terms of concepts combined with such a wily prose style. I always hesitate talking about prose style when dealing with translations. It is impossible for me to know if the word choice is as spot on as I hope. All the same, it is hard to believe that the writer's sentences and paragraphs do not reflect the original texts.
First reactions. Telephone interview, October 2025
I offer up some quotes, but they are inadequate. Following them for more, if you are so inclined.
Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai wins Nobel Prize in literature (Brisbane Times)
Krasznahorkai has received many awards including the 2015 Man Booker International Prize. The Booker judges praised his “extraordinary sentences, sentences of incredible length that go to incredible lengths, their tone switching from solemn to madcap to quizzical to desolate as they go their wayward way”.
He also won the National Book Award for Translated Literature in the US in 2019 for Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming.
The American writer and critic Susan Sontag has described Krasznahorkai as the “contemporary master of the Apocalypse.” He was also friends with American poet and writer Allen Ginsberg and would regularly stay in Ginsberg’s apartment while visiting New York City.
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.
For new readers, all this can perhaps be best encountered in Krasznahorkai’s latest novel, “Herscht 07769,” about a larger-than-life yet, in his own way, perfectly ordinary man, Florian Herscht, who lives in a small town in Thuringia, in former East Germany, and whose job is scrubbing graffiti off the town’s public buildings. Herscht is like some inspired but confused combination of Saul Bellow’s Herzog, Thomas Bernhard’s Wertheimer, and Hanta, the solitary narrator of Bohumil Hrabal’s novel “Too Loud a Solitude” (1976), whose job is compacting wastepaper and old books. Herscht has got hold of the idea that a buildup of antimatter is somehow going to destroy the world, and he decides that the person who can best answer his concerns is the German Chancellor (and former physicist and quantum chemist) Angela Merkel. To her, he starts writing long letters that go profoundly unanswered, signed by his last name and postcode: Herscht 07769.
Is This the First-Ever English Language Review of László Krasznahorkai? (Literary Hub)
In the States, we’re far more familiar with the works of Bela Lugosi and Zsa Zsa Gabor than Endre Ady and Dezső Kosztolányi. As for more contemporary Hungarian writers go, few have been translated and even fewer have received any sort of exposure here in the New World. The Two Peters, Nadas and Esterházy, make a small splash every couple of years when something new sneaks into English, but Miklós Mészöly, Lajos Grendel and Tibor Déry represent a truly lost generation, at least to us. The publication of László Krasznahorkai’s The Melancholy of Resistance can change all that. It’s one Hungarian book well deserving of a place on every reading list and within every new year’s resolution.
Melancholy originally appeared in Hungary in 1989, but like the Magyar countryside itself, the book maintains a truly timeless quality. Krasznahorkai is stingy with the details of the setting; only a few clues (a red star on a toy soldier, “all those shiny Mercedes”) place the book in the waning years of the Russian occupation. Otherwise, it could have just as easily taken place a hundred years ago. The action, for lack of a better word, takes place in a small, rural village near the Hungarian-Rumanian border.
From Nobel Prize laureate László Krasznahorkai, lessons in endurance (Indian Express)
Reading László Krasznahorkai can be a daunting exercise. The Hungarian writer’s characters drift through landscapes of entropy and ruin — provincial towns, collapsing empires, haunted minds. His prose unfurls across long, labyrinthine sentences that spiral through darkness and grace, that demands that readers look harder, stay longer, feel more. But for those who follow his winding syntax to the end, the reward is a haunting clarity, of the faint, stubborn lights of hope that lie beyond the abyss. It is this architecture of apocalypse and his almost monastic faith in language’s capacity to reckon with chaos, “his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art”, that the Nobel Prize in Literature 2025 honoured.
A great pessimist and unapologetic traditionalist: László Krasznahorkai wins the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature (The Conversation)
At the heart of Krasznahorkai’s project is the old Beckettian dialectic between pervasive bleakness and ethical despair, and a madly propulsive, inexhaustible engine of language.
His language is the mad scream of a godless universe at our inexcusable squandering of every good thing given to us by chance. The voluble form stirs up the broken content in an irresistible current, flowing from the Big Bang to Paradise – right past our lost world.
His prose is difficult to excerpt. The sentences never end, so even a few quoted words inevitably draw one into the vortex of an all-consuming syntactical storm system. There is no way out once you are drawn in. You find yourself in a stylistic quicksand that is perversely comforting.
***
If that was all there was, Krasznahorkai’s work would be a tough slog indeed – which it is. But it is not without gracious compensations.
Krasznahorkai is an unapologetic traditionalist. He holds to an idea of the arts as our best resource for preventing the slide into barbarism. In an interview earlier this year, he said:
Art is humanity’s extraordinary response to the sense of lostness that is our fate. Beauty exists. It lies beyond a boundary where we must constantly halt; we cannot go further to grasp or touch beauty – we can only gaze at it from this boundary and acknowledge that, yes, there is truly something out there in the distance. Beauty is a construction, a complex creation of hope and higher order.
Why László Krasznahorkai won the Nobel Prize for Literature: The Hungarian author’s work has a huge and haunting vision (The New Statesman)
But while Krasznahorkai is not an example of an unknown Nobel winner, his work did not appear in English until 1998, when the poet George Szirtes translated The Melancholy of Resistance, which portrays the visit of a circus to a strange town, among other things. It received praise from WG Sebald and Susan Sontag, who called him a “master of apocalypse”. That concept comes up again and again in responses to Krasznahorkai’s fiction. The Nobel committee, obliged each year to summarise the winner’s body of work in a way that explains or at least asserts its Nobel-worthiness, stated that it was recognising Krasznahorkai’s affirmation of the power of art “in the midst of apocalyptic terror”. Other Krasznahorkai keywords (hardly unrelated) are “visionary” and “obsessive”. Also, in reference to Krasznahorkai’s dour subject matter and long – sometimes book-length – sentences: difficult, challenging, prickly, modernist. Szirtes, one of two English translators, along with Ottilie Mulzet, has evoked “a vast black river of type”. The opening of Sátántangó exhibits many of his central characteristics (strange phenomena, negatives, parentheses, dismal weather, aversion to the comma):
“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. The closest possible source was a lonely chapel about four kilometres southwest on the old Hochmeiss estate but not only did that have no bell but the tower had collapsed during the war…”
The Vindication of László Krasznahorkai (The New Republic)
To pick a fairly mild example. In my experience, however, reading Krasznahorkai is challenging not because it is unwieldy and frenetic but because it is meticulously, precisely, intricately ordered. Antecedents are answered by consequents, clauses that are left open find closure, chains of thought eventually relink—even if we must track them over pages. We are not used to this task. For me, reading his sentences, following the subtleties in his worlds, serves as a dose of rare and cleansing concentration. It is a visceral experience of feeling one’s brain struggling with, but ultimately embracing, a mental mode far different from the one conditioned by emails and group chats, social media, and screen time. It doesn’t feel like getting lost: It feels like finding oneself precisely coordinated, grounded in a mass of text. It is a pure antidote to the worst cognitive tendencies in the rest of our lives.
Colm Tóibín: Why I set up a press to publish Nobel winner László Krasznahorkai (The Guardian)
That Christmas – it was almost 20 years ago – I came back from America with news. My friend Daniel Medin had recommended two books to me, both by the Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai, one called War and War and the other The Melancholy of Resistance. We had also watched some Béla Tarr films, whose screenplays had been written by Krasznahorkai. The sense of slow, seething menace in the film Werckmeister Harmonies, based on The Melancholy of Resistance, and the lack of easy psychology and obvious motive in the film, the camera moving like a cat, made it exciting, but not as exciting as the two novels.
Krasznahorkai, I noticed, loved the snaking sentence, the high-wire act, mild panic steering towards a shivering fear felt by his characters, followed, in clause after clause, by fitful realisations and further reasons for gloom or alarm, and then, with just a comma in between, ironic (and even comic) responses to what comes next into the mind. These extraordinary sentences had been translated by the poet George Szirtes with considerable rhythmic energy.
If you want your prose simple and tasteless, there is James Patterson for you, but if you want to try the wild and wondrous, then read Krasznahorkai. He is like drinking Wild Turkey, straight out of the bottle.
sch 10/10
Updated 10/12:
Hari Kunzru (a writer also worth tracking down) interviews Krasznahorkai, László Krasznahorkai: The Nobel laureate insists on the reality of the present (The Yale Review)
HK “An Angel Passed Above Us” follows two dying men in a dugout, one of whom is telling a kind of fairy tale about the wonders of globalization to the other. The contrast between that fairy tale and the reality for the two dying men is very stark. It seems to undercut the techno-optimistic tone of this tale about the accelerating world. Could you say something more about why you have chosen to place these two elements side by side?
LK A dirty, rotten war is unfolding before my eyes. The world is starting to get used to it. I cannot get used to it. I am incapable of accepting that people are killing people. Maybe I’m a psychiatric case. All of this is happening while, in the digital space, there is a vision of the future promising that the terrifyingly rapid advancement of technology will soon bring a beautiful new world. This is complete madness. While a fundamentally twentieth-century war is raging, someone is talking about how we’ll soon be going to Mars. I hope Putin and his sympathizers will be the first passengers.
***
HK We have spoken before about the way literary characters come into being as presences manifested through writers into the world. In an interview with The Paris Review, you said that “every character in so-called eternal fiction came through ordinary people. This is a secret process, but I’m entirely sure that it’s true.” Could you expand on this?
LK Only the ordinary person exists. And they are sacred.
László Krasznahorkai, The Art of Fiction No. 240
INTERVIEWER
What kind of jobs were you doing?KRASZNAHORKAI
I was a miner for a while. That was almost comical—the real miners had to cover for me. Then I became a director of various culture houses in villages far from Budapest. Every village had a culture house where people could read the classics. This library was all they had in their everyday lives. And on Fridays or Saturdays, the director of the culture house organized a music party, or something like it, which was very good for young people. I was the director for six very small villages, which meant I always moved between them. It was a great job. I loved it because I was very far from my bourgeois family.
What else? I was night watchman for three hundred cows. That was my favorite—a byre in no man’s land. There was no village, no city, no town nearby. I was a watchman for a few months, maybe. A poor life with Under the Volcano in one pocket and Dostoyevsky in the other.
And of course, in these Wanderjahre, I began to drink. There was a tradition in Hungarian literature that true geniuses were total drunks. And I was a crazed drunk, too. But then came a moment when I was sitting with a group of Hungarian writers who were sadly agreeing that this was inevitable, that any Hungarian genius had to be a crazed drunk. I refused to accept this and made a bet—for twelve bottles of champagne—that I would never drink again.
How can you not like a man like this? Then you should read him. There is life in him that opposes our instinct for destruction.
sch
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