Laszlo Krasznahorkai: A Hungarian Tragedy: American Hungarian Federation



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Krasznahorkai -- Potential Nobel Laureate? The July 4, 2011 issue of "The New Yorker" magazine includes a long, 5-page scholarly essay by James Wood about Hungarian writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai. Wood is a literary critic, and Harvard literature professor, his books include "How Fiction Works," and "The Broken Estate."

The title of Wood's essay is "Madness and Civilization," and his subtitle is "The very strange fictions of Laszlo Krasznahorkai." Wood analyzes and dissects Krasznahorkai's two novels --"The Melancholy of Resistance" ("Az ellenallas Melankoliaja") and "War and War;" Krasznahorkai's collaboration with Bela Tarr in the 7-hour movie titled "Satantango;" and Krasznahorkai's most recent collaboration with the German artist Max Neumann. A major part of the essay deals with the analysis and explanation of Karasznahorkai's very strange literary style: extremely long and dense sentences, sometimes running the length of an entire chapter of the book. "Krasznahorkai is clearly fascinated by apocalypse, by broken revelations, indecipherable messages. To be always 'on the threshold of some decisive perception' is as natural to a Krasznahorkai character as thinking about God is to a Dostoyevsky character..." writes Wood.

Wood places Krasznahorkai in the company of such writers as Claude Simon, Thomas Bernhard, Jose Saramago, W.G Sebald, Roberto Bolano, David Foster Wallace, and James Kelman. "Of all these novelists, " says Wood, "Krasznahorkai is perhaps the strangest."

Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula in 1954; he has lived both in Germany and in America; his name is more familiar in Europe than in the United States. "In Germany, he is almost canonical," says Wood; and Germans think of him as a potential Nobel laureate. "So readers of English await more of Krasznahorkai's fiction and are, seemingly, reliant on George Szirtes, his translator..." explains James Wood.

The long, scholarly essay may be found in the July 4, 2011 issue of The New Yorker, pp. 71-75.

Zoltan Bagdy

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