A Nobel prize in literature for Laszlo Krasznahorkai
Culture | The man from Gyula
A Nobel prize in literature for Laszlo Krasznahorkai
The Hungarian writer is known for his post-modern dystopian fiction. But his work is not all doom and gloom
ON OCTOBER 9TH the Swedish Academy anointed Laszlo Krasznahorkai the newest Nobel laureate in literature, saluting the Hungarian writer’s “compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art”. That citation underlines a received idea of the 71-year-old novelist and essayist as a dour prophet of disorder and disaster.
It is true that no reader will ever go to Mr Krasznahorkai’s fiction for a quick light read: his serpentine sentences can wind their way across several pages. But to view him as a dystopian doomsayer narrows the writer and the man. His prose holds a rich vein of gallows humour; he sees literature as a bulwark against cruelty and chaos.
Born in Gyula, his father a lawyer and his mother a civil servant, Mr Krasznahorkai grew up under Hungary’s moribund communist regime. He studied law and literature, lived rough for a while and initially wrote as an unaffiliated outsider. He combined incendiary satire of the small-minded stagnation of rural Hungary with an intense lyricism. “Satantango” (1985), his breakthrough novel, evoked not just the rain-sodden misery of forlorn backwaters but the false hope that grips left-behind people when charlatan saviours ride into town. His writer’s gaze may be piercing, but it is not misanthropic. “When I’m depicting ourselves in a satirical fashion, I’m still full of sympathy,” he told your correspondent in 2018.
Later books, such as “The Melancholy of Resistance” (1989), also feature phoney redeemers and probe the human hunger to believe in them. After the collapse of communism in his home country, his horizons could broaden. Already inspired by his periods in Germany, he later travelled extensively in Asia. The cultures of China and Japan, especially the traditional arts that have endured there despite immense upheavals, infuse works such as “Seiobo There Below” (2008). Mr Krasznahorkai even helped in the ritual rebuilding of a Shinto temple near Osaka.
His respect for tradition has nothing to do with reactionary nostalgia, which he distrusts as much as he did utopian communism. Mr Krasznahorkai wondered at the “ever more amazing, ever more dangerous” technology that shapes people’s lives. Such tools pose a threat, he asserted, “because they’re in human hands”. This kind of humour—bleak but persistent—echoes through the comfortless landscape of his books.
He accepts that he writes “tragicomedy”, but warns that “with the comic element you should not just be guffawing with laughter.” Despair and disillusion mingle with the hope that human beings might come to cherish, rather than trash, one another and the home they share. In one of the stories in his collection, “The World Goes On” (2013), Yuri Gagarin, a Soviet cosmonaut, returns to Earth and reports that “I really saw Paradise, and Paradise is the Earth.”
Mr Krasznahorkai’s uncompromising stance and style meant that it took many years for his reputation to spread. Starting with “Satantango”, Bela Tarr’s film adaptations fed foreign curiosity about Mr Krasznahorkai’s work (although George Szirtes’s English version of that novel did not appear until 2012). A trio of excellent translators—Mr Szirtes, Ottilie Mulzet and John Batki—have helped move him from cult figure to globally appreciated writer.
The Nobel judges have acknowledged an exploratory-prose modernist whose work invites comparisons with that of Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard and Franz Kafka. In honouring Mr Krasznahorkai, they have themselves reaffirmed a faith in career-long literary artistry pursued as the winds of fashion and convention shift. In that sense, Mr Krasznahorkai makes quite a traditional Nobel laureate. ■
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