LÁSZLÓ KRASZNAHORKAI

László Krasznahorkai is a Hungarian novelist and screenwriter known for demanding novels with dystopian and melancholic themes. Several of his works have been adapted into feature films by Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr.

László Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, Hungary, on 5 January 1954. Since completing his university studies, Krasznahorkai has worked as an independent writer. In 1985, his debut novel Satantango achieved immediate success and brought him to the forefront of Hungarian literary life. It is a dystopian novel set in his native Hungary and is considered his best-known work. Beginning in 1985, renowned director and close friend of the author Béla Tarr made films almost exclusively based on Krasznahorkai’s works.

Krasznahorkai has received international critical acclaim. Susan Sontag described him as a contemporary Hungarian master of the apocalypse, comparing him to Gogol and Melville. W. G. Sebald noted that the universality of Krasznahorkai’s vision rivals that of Gogol’s Dead Souls and far surpasses the lesser concerns of contemporary writing. In 2015, he received the International Booker Prize, becoming the first Hungarian author to win the award.

He has published the following novels: Satantango (1985), The Melancholy of Resistance (1989), The Prisoner of Urga (1992), War & War (1999), Destruction and Sorrow Beneath the Heavens (2004), Seiobo There Below (2008), Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming (2016), and Herscht 07769 (2021); novellas: The World Goes On? [Note: the Serbian source lists Mountain to the North, Lake to the South, Roads to the West, River to the East (2003), The Last Wolf (2009), Aprómunka egy palotaért (2018), and Mindig Homérosznak (2019)]; and collections of short stories: Relations of Grace (1986) and The World Goes On (2013). He wrote the screenplays for Béla Tarr’s films Damnation (1988), The Last Boat (1989), Satantango (1994), Werckmeister Harmonies (1997–2001), The Man from London (2007), and The Turin Horse (2011).

Krasznahorkai has received numerous literary awards, including the Austrian State Prize for European Literature (2021), the Literature.gr Phrase of the Year Prize (2020), the National Book Award for Translated Literature in the United States for Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming (2019), the Aegon Art Award for Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming (2017), the International Booker Prize (2015), the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers fellowship at the New York Public Library (2015), the Vilenica Prize (2014), the Best Translated Book Award for Ottilie Mulzet’s translation of Seiobo There Below (2014), the America Award for Lifetime Contribution to International Writing (2014), the Best Translated Book Award for George Szirtes’s translation of Satantango (2013), the Prima Primissima Prize (2012), the Brücke-Berlin Prize (Germany, 2010) for Seiobo There Below, the Spycher Prize (Switzerland, 2010) for his body of work, particularly the novella The World Goes On? [as listed in the source], the Hungarian Writers’ Association Award (2009), the Hungarian Heritage Award (2008), the Kossuth Prize (2004), the Soros Foundation Award (2003), the Laureate of the Republic of Hungary (2002), the Sándor Márai Award (1998), the Gyula Krúdy Award (1993), the Bestenliste Award (Germany, 1993) for The Melancholy of Resistance, the Tibor Déry Award (1992), a DAAD Fellowship (West Berlin, 1987/1988), the Attila József Prize (1987), and the Mikes Kelemen Kör Award (Netherlands, 1987).

About the novel Satantango

László Krasznahorkai’s inexhaustible, claustrophobic prose, with its long, meandering yet precise sentences, presents an absurd and visceral saga stretched between banality and apocalypse, placing him in the distinguished company of European writers such as Kafka, Beckett and Bernhard.

Satantango is a “novel of waiting” about an unnamed Hungarian village and its impoverished, grotesque inhabitants, trapped by their own inability to leave their stagnant backwater and search for a better future. Taking place over three rainy days, the plot culminates in a central scene of dancing with the devil in the local tavern, while the novel’s circular structure reinforces the sense of being unable to escape the cycle in which this infernal dance takes place. The work seems to follow the steps of a tango as the bleak reality, portrayed through the psychological states of the villagers, slowly but inevitably collapses. A great tragedy will occur, and the false prophet Irimiás will emerge as the central figure in this inexorable disintegration. It is a simple story, written in a complex yet impeccably precise style, filled with disturbing details and narrative “loops” that force the reader to question the foundations of their own reality.

Satantango, a masterpiece of contemporary European and Hungarian literature, on which Béla Tarr based his cult classic of almost eight hours in length, offers yet another confirmation of the old idea that the devil always has the best time. He delights in the infidelities, intrigues, unfulfilled hopes and brutally interrupted dreams of the remaining villagers, embittered by malice and unable to free themselves from the quicksand of everyday life. Their world exists somewhere between the cosmic and the tragic, in the most insignificant corner of the universe, where everyone knows, with absolute certainty, the steps of the great dance of death.

About the novel The Melancholy of Resistance

The Melancholy of Resistance, Krasznahorkai’s second novel, tells an unusual story set in a small town in the Hungarian Great Plain, where a circus arrives with an enormous stuffed whale. It soon becomes clear, however, that both the circus and the whale are merely a façade and an excuse for the Prince, a terrifying “creature from the shadows,” to incite a mob that begins destroying everything in its path in the name of some supposed “restoration of the Whole.” The general atmosphere of panic and confusion is exploited by the robust and ambitious Mrs Eszter, who seizes the levers of political power in the town. This novel by László Krasznahorkai takes the reader into the dark depths of a world devastated in every sense, where everyday logic no longer applies and all conventional notions of life are ruthlessly dismantled.

About the short-story collection The World Goes On

The stories collected in this book take place in various parts of the world, with their settings ranging from the present day to the very recent past. The protagonists are people with great expectations and desires who constantly dream of leaving and escaping their everyday lives, yet ultimately lack the courage to change anything about their trivial existences and remain where they are, while the world moves on, as the title itself implicitly suggests.

ANDREW CRUMEY

Andrew Crumey was born in Glasgow in 1961. He holds a PhD in theoretical physics. He was director of West London Nightline and a caregiver at Westminster Mencap. He moved to Newcastle in 1992 and began working as a mathematics teacher in secondary schools. However, in 1996, he began writing book reviews. He has also written for The Guardian, The Independent, The Telegraph, The Financial Times and other newspapers. He regularly participates in literary and scientific conferences.

As a writer, he has long been recognized as a distinctive voice in Scottish literature. He is the author of eight novels, which have been translated into fifteen languages. He has received two prestigious literary awards, the Saltire Award and the Northern Rock Foundation Writer’s Award. For several years, he worked as an editor for Scotland on Sunday and as a research fellow at the Durham Institute for Advanced Studies. He currently teaches creative writing at Northumbria University in Newcastle and regularly reviews books for the Wall Street Journal and other publications.

Philosophy, history, science and music are among the themes that preoccupy Andrew Crumey’s fiction. Finding the term “novel of ideas” too constricting, he prefers the expression “somewhat philosophical novel.” Crumey’s first book, Music in a Foreign Language, was published in 1994. He soon published two more books: Pfitz (1995) and D’Alembert’s Principle (1996). Pfitz was a New York Times Notable Book, while D’Alembert’s Principle was nominated for the Booker Prize. In 2000, he published the novel Mr Mee, followed by Möbius Dick in 2004. Crumey won the £60,000 Northern Rock Foundation Writer’s Award, the largest literary prize in the United Kingdom, for his novel Sputnik Caledonia, published in 2008. The only Crumey novel to date translated into Serbian, Secret Knowledge, was published in 2013. His eighth book, The Great Chain of Unbeing, was published in 2018.

About the novel Secret Knowledge

“The basic concept of the novel is an idea that Crumey has explored several times: quantum suicide, a concept that combines the metaphor of Schrödinger’s cat with the idea of the multiverse, that is, multiple interconnected universes branching off from the smallest changes in the course of history and subsequently diverging to an ever greater degree. The idea of quantum suicide is based on the premise that, in every life-threatening situation, several parallel universes come into existence, and that in at least one of them the person in danger must survive. Secret Knowledge examines precisely such a case: in 1913, the young composer Pierre Klauer kills himself for seemingly incomprehensible reasons, immediately after proposing to the woman he loves. Several decades later, David Conroy, an unsuccessful concert pianist and piano teacher, while attempting to come to terms with the decline of his career and the collapse of a long-term relationship, comes across the manuscript of Klauer’s work Secret Knowledge and discovers the possibility that Klauer survived. […] ‘…the book is about a musician completely opposed to false prestige, the shallow taste of the masses and conventional opinion; a person who lives for art in a world that recognizes only commercial value, which is why he is considered mad.’ In this brief, unspoken reply, Crumey manages to touch upon several themes at once: to establish a connection with the novel Möbius Dick, in which he explores Schumann’s composition inspired by Hoffmann’s work; to succinctly convey Conroy’s perception of himself; and to implicitly evoke Hoffmann’s The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr, in which, with similar compositional daring, the contrasting biographies of Murr and Kreisler alternate and intertwine. In this multilayered counterpoint, everything that makes Secret Knowledge worth reading comes together.” (Tijana Tropin)