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Journalism of Courage
To read László Krasznahorkai is to surrender punctuation, plot, and perhaps sanity. His novels unspool in paragraphs the length of chapters, their sentences coiling endlessly, dragging the reader into a trance of syntax and dread. The Hungarian author—hailed by Susan Sontag as “the contemporary master of the apocalypse”—has turned the act of reading into a spiritual ordeal.
Awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature and the Man Booker International in 2015, Krasznahorkai stands as one of the few living writers who treat literature as revelation. His world is one of cosmic decay and stubborn beauty, where the absurd is indistinguishable from the divine. For those ready to enter his labyrinth, here’s where to begin:
Krasznahorkai’s debut is the foundation of his mythos. It features a rain-soaked, post-Communist wasteland where a dozen desperate villagers wait for the return of a charismatic trickster who might either be their saviour or their doom. Structured like a tango (six steps forward, six steps back), the novel’s twelve chapters loop in time, each sentence stretching until language seems to fray.
Set on a derelict collective farm not unlike the one in his birthplace of Gyula, Satantango captures Hungary’s late-Communist despair with hallucinatory force. Béla Tarr’s seven-hour film adaptation, made in collaboration with Krasznahorkai, turned it into a legend of slow cinema. Start here to feel the rhythm of his chaos, his bleak humor, and the strange beauty of his sentences, which seem to resist decay.
If Satantango whispers apocalypse, The Melancholy of Resistance shouts it. A traveling circus arrives in a provincial town bearing the carcass of a giant whale, unleashing paranoia, mob violence, and a comic-political nightmare. The dreamlike terror feels eerily prophetic: a study of how societies slide into authoritarianism while staring, spellbound, at the spectacle.
At the novel’s heart is Valuska, a holy fool whose naïve wonder mirrors the cosmos’ indifference. This is Krasznahorkai at his most biblical—funny, grotesque, and unbearably sad—a vision of civilization collapsing into absurdity.
Perhaps the most “accessible” of his epics, War & War follows György Korim, a Hungarian archivist who discovers an ancient manuscript and flees to New York to post it online before ending his life. It is a tragicomic parable about preservation and futility in the digital age, a book that asks whether anything we create can survive us.
Here, Krasznahorkai’s syntax becomes symphonic, his digressions ecstatic. Korim’s doomed project anticipates our online mania for immortality through data. Yet in the novel’s final grace note, he finds transcendence in the act of giving it away.
After decades of apocalyptic darkness, Krasznahorkai turns toward art. Seiobo There Below abandons narrative collapse for a pilgrimage through beauty. Across seventeen interlinked stories arranged in a Fibonacci sequence, we encounter a Kyoto heron, a Noh actor, a Renaissance painter, and the divine goddess Seiobo herself, who returns to earth seeking perfection.
Drawing from his travels in East Asia, Krasznahorkai replaces despair with devotion. The result is a radiant meditation on the sacred labor of creation and on how art, like prayer, strives for the impossible. It is his most serene book.
Winner of the 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature, Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming fuses metaphysical farce with Dostoyevskian pathos. A ruined aristocrat returns from Argentina to his Hungarian hometown, dreaming of rekindled love but finding only bureaucratic hysteria and provincial absurdity.
A vast chorus of voices (priests, bikers, scientists, fools) crowd the novel’s pages, creating a panoramic requiem for modern Hungary. Yet amid the nihilism, there is laughter, even if it is the laughter of someone who’s seen meaning collapse and found, miraculously, that life goes on. Many critics consider it Krasznahorkai’s crowning achievement.
Krasznahorkai’s latest and most dizzying work moves his apocalypse to contemporary Germany. Florian Herscht, a gentle giant and amateur physicist, becomes convinced that the universe is about to disintegrate and writes to Angela Merkel for help. Surrounded by neo-Nazis, wolves, and the ghosts of Bach, Herscht embodies Europe’s moral bewilderment.
Written long, unbroken passages characteristic of his late style, Herscht 07769 is both a comedy of cosmic terror and a requiem for reason. Critics have called it “a great German novel written by a Hungarian mystic.” It proves that Krasznahorkai’s formidable style is still alive and kicking.
