Today, October 9th, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature was announced. Personally, I was expecting — like so many other readers — that this year the Nobel would go to the Japanese Haruki Murakami, a writer who has been among the main candidates for the award for years. Although it could not be, the news of the winner surprised me just the same: the Hungarian László Krasznahorkai, author of novels such as “Satanic Tango” (1985), “Melancholy of Resistance” (1989), and “War and War” (1999), all published in Spanish by Acantilado, with brilliant translations by the Chilean Adan Kovacsics.
Krasznahorkai was born on January 5, 1954, in Gyula, a town located on the eastern border of Hungary, adjacent to Romania. Between 1978 and 1983, he studied Hungarian Language and Literature at the Faculty of Humanities of Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE). His thesis focused on the work and experiences of the Hungarian writer Sándor Márai following his exile after the communist takeover in 1948.
Early in his career, Krasznahorkai collaborated with his compatriot and friend Béla Tarr as a screenwriter for several films, which include adaptations of his own works: “The Condemned” (1988); “The Last Boat” (1989); “Satanic Tango” (1994), which has a runtime of seven hours and twelve minutes; “Werckmeister Harmonies” (1997-2001); “The Man from London” (2007); and “The Turin Horse” (2011).
László Krasznahorkai. Source: El Mundo
“Satanic Tango,” the novel with which he debuted as a writer, was an immediate success and remains his most famous title today. This postmodern work is composed of two parts; each consists of six chapters that form a long paragraph without line breaks. In the first part, the chapters are numbered one to six; and in the second, six to one. This structure resembles that of a tango. Although it may seem like a somewhat tough read at first due to its organization, this strange arrangement pushes the reader back and forth, like in the tango, in search of references and ideas that clarify the loose points in the story.
Krasznahorkai detailed with photorealistic precision the ups and downs of the collapse and abandonment of a collective farm at the end of the regime of the People's Republic of Hungary. Most of the action takes place in a ruined village, deteriorated, with barren lands, where the soil is no longer worked and the peasants' huts have fallen into disrepair. It always rains and everything is damp. The inhabitants are few and eccentric: a few families; an innkeeper; a school principal — with no school functioning —; some shepherds and their unfaithful wives, like the dissatisfied Mrs. Schmidt; and the Doctor, a cultured, albeit reclusive, drunk who observes and documents the events. Everyone resents and deceives each other. The Doctor only goes out to the village after running out of drink, but soon faces the tense atmosphere enveloping the village.
Still from the film adaptation of Satanic Tango: the girl Estike (Erika Bók). Source: Bela Tarr
Futaki, one of these peasants, wakes up one morning to the sound of church bells. He discovers that two locals are planning to escape to the city in search of progress, with the proceeds from selling livestock. It is in this post-apocalyptic setting that Irimiás, a false prophet who exercises almost divine influence over the others, appears. He returns to the village after having been presumed dead, having been condemned for corruption, and ultimately the conspiracy of the peasants falls apart. Irimiás ignites a spark of hope in the inhabitants of the village, whom he manages to extort by blaming them for the suicide of a girl, little Estike, so that they give him the money they earned on the farm. He convinces them to move to another new desolate community. In the rundown inn of their ruined village, the inhabitants continue to dance a tango in which they cannot afford to make a misstep. When the villagers understand the reality of Irimiás' intentions, he ends up dispersing them throughout the country for an indefinite period.
The signs of alert are few and seem insufficient: the general unease caused by the mutual distrust; the fear instilled by Irimiás’ actions; the sound of bells whose origin is unclear, as the church is in ruins; the nonsensical babbling of a madman, a warning. The Doctor is the only one left in the abandoned village. At the end of the work, the circle closes and the story begins anew; neither the reader nor the characters can escape.
Krasznahorkai's work has received great critical acclaim. American writer Susan Sontag called him “the contemporary Hungarian master of the apocalypse who inspires comparisons with Gogol and Melville,” and the German W. G. Sebald wrote that “the universality of Krasznahorkai's vision rivals Gogol's Dead Souls and far surpasses all lesser concerns of contemporary writing.” Undoubtedly, László Krasznahorkai skillfully and intimately delves into the particularities of the soul and into an apocalypse that takes the form of an unending cycle. His work transcends the documentary representation of life under Hungarian socialism, as it explores fear, deception, contradictions, desires, ambitions, and the limits of selfishness, realities that are universal to all times and to all men.
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