Madness and Civilization

„»Reality examined to the point of madness«. What would this look like, in contemporary writing? It might look like the fiction of László Krasznahorkai, the difficult, peculiar, obsessive, visionary Hungarian author of six novels, only two of which are available in English, The Melancholy of Resistance and “War and War, both published by New Directions. Postwar avant-garde fiction has tended to move between augmentation and subtraction. Mentions Claude Simon, Thomas Bernhard, José Saramago, W. G. Sebald, Roberto Bolaño, and David Foster Wallace. Of all these novelists, Krasznahorkai is perhaps the strangest. His tireless, tiring sentences feel potentially endless, and are presented without paragraph breaks.

Krasznahorkai’s brilliant translator, the poet George Szirtes, refers to his prose as a slow lava-flow of narrative. It’s often hard to know exactly what Krasznahorkai’s characters are thinking, because his fictional world teeters on the edge of a revelation that never quite comes. László Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, in southeast Hungary, in 1954. He is probably best known through the oeuvre of the director Béla Tarr, who has collaborated with him on several movies. Mentions Werckmeister Harmonies. In War and War, György Korin, an archivist and local historian, travels to New York, finds lodgings with a Hungarian interpreter, and begins to write the text of the transcendently important manuscript.”