It’s great to see Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai win the Nobel prize this. year. I read Sátántangó a few years back and was floored by it. Equally powerful is Béla Tarr’s seven-hour film version.
Here’s a taste, via a wonderful translation from Hungarian by George Szirtes. This is early in the novel, when Futak awakens to the sound of bells in a church tower where there is no bell …
He gazed sadly at the threatening sky, at the burned-out remnants of a locust-plagued summer, and suddenly saw on the twig of an acacia, as in a vision, the progress of spring, summer, fall and winter, as if the whole of time were a frivolous interlude in the much greater spaces of eternity, a brilliant conjuring trick to produce something apparently orderly out of chaos, to establish a vantage point from which chance might begin to look like necessity . . . and he saw himself nailed to the cross of his own cradle and coffin, painfully trying to tear his body away, only, eventually, to deliver himself — utterly naked, without identifying mark, stripped down to essentials — into the care of the people whose duty it was to wash the corpses, people obeying an order snapped out in the dry air against a background loud with torturers and flayers of skin, where he was obliged to regard the human condition without a trace of pity, without a single possibility of any way back to life, because by then he would know for certain that all his life he had been playing with cheaters who had marked the cards and who would, in the end, strip him even of his last means of defense, of that hope of someday finding his way back home.
— László Krasznahorkai, Sátántangó
Laura and I are going to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream later this month, so I’m re-reading the play. I was struck by how much Helen’s pleas to Demetrius echo Iggy Pop and the Stooges