As October creeps in each year, the world awaits with bated breath the names recognized by the Nobel Committee as those that have conferred “the greatest benefit to humankind.” This year, the coveted literary honor was awarded to the Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai for his unique vision of the apocalypse.
At the age of 71, Krasznahorkai has become only the second Hungarian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, succeeding Holocaust survivor Imre Kertész’s 2002 win for his powerful exploration of historical tragedy. The statistic seems almost a shame for a country with so rich a literary history, resplendent with exceptional writers such as Magda Szabó (whose novel The Door unravels a complex codependency between two women) or Ferenc Molnár (whose The Paul Street Boys remains perhaps the most twisted portrayal of a fight between schoolboys).
Nevertheless, Krasznahorkai’s recognition offers a bigger platform to one of the most deservedly famed writers in the Hungarian language, dubbed by no less than Susan Sontag as the “contemporary master of the Apocalypse.” It also marks the fourth consecutive year the Nobel has been awarded to a writer predominantly working in a non-English language. The news bears good tidings for the prize’s linguistic diversity, though its geographic diversity remains questionable.
Krasznahorkai’s works have inspired comparisons to authors ranging from Franz Kafka to W.G. Sebald, though he has made mention of his desire “to be free to stray far from [his] literary ancestors and not make some new version of Kafka, Dostoyevsky or Faulkner.” Certainly, he has curated his own visionary voice in works such as The Melancholy of Resistance, where a town embarks on a disturbing and surreal descent into madness after the arrival of a traveling circus exhibiting a whale carcass.
The novel captures the essence of spiraling social order with Krasznahorkai’s signature winding writing style — a style perhaps best exemplified by his novel Herscht 07769, made up of only a single sentence stretched across hundreds of pages by commas and delirium. The judges of the 2015 Man Booker International Prize put it best when they acclaimed Krasznahorkai for his “extraordinary sentences, sentences of incredible length that go to incredible lengths, their tone switching from solemn to madcap to quizzical to desolate as they go their wayward way.”
The writer’s idiosyncrasies emerge as consistent themes throughout his body of work — for anyone looking to steep themselves in an atmosphere of bleak and oblique collapse tinged with the driest of humor, you can’t go wrong with one of his books.
His consistent exploration of human greed seems shared with other Hungarian literary staples, augmented by the social critique embedded in each of his apocalypses. His novels brim with his potent voice, expressing insights into human nature in a manner at once intensely dark and darkly funny.
“Because you don't talk,” exclaims a man at the end of his rope in The Melancholy of Resistance, “you ‘whisper’ or ‘expostulate’; you don't walk down the street but ‘proceed feverishly’; you don't enter a place but ‘cross its threshold,’ you don't feel cold or hot, but ‘find yourselves shivering’ or ‘feeling the sweat pour down you!’”
It is almost impossible to speak of the writer without addressing his immense contributions to the movies of the famed Hungarian director Béla Tarr — a match practically made in heaven with Tarr’s signature torturous pace and evocatively melancholic atmosphere perfectly complementing Krasznahorkai’s own grueling but compelling writing style.
The 7-hour long Sátántangó, adapted from and best enjoyed in conjunction with Krasznahorkai's debut novel of the same name, is perhaps the most pivotal example, crafting a nightmarish and hypnotic vision of hell from the tribulations of a small village. Mention must also be made of Krasznahorkai’s contributions as a screenwriter for The Turin Horse, a film bearing his classic touch of that all-consuming degradation in the smallest of contexts in the life of a farmer.
Some might question the message the Nobel committee sends by lauding such an unrelenting and cynical oeuvre. In my eyes, Krasznahorkai’s virtue mainly stems from his singular conception of a dystopia — not one inspired by new fantastic creations like in so many classic works of science fiction or one caused by cataclysmic globe-shaking disaster, but many smaller apocalypses emerging from the tenuous threads that hold people together.
His words carry a timeless relevance that makes them appear almost eerily prescient in their commentary on the fragility of social order. Krasznahorkai sweeps up his readers into a feverish whirlpool of despair and spits them out with the kind of catharsis that can only come from complete submersion.
