Opinion From Nobel Prize laureate László Krasznahorkai, lessons in endurance

Reading László Krasznahorkai can be a daunting exercise. The Hungarian writer’s characters drift through landscapes of entropy and ruin — provincial towns, collapsing empires, haunted minds. His prose unfurls across long, labyrinthine sentences that spiral through darkness and grace, that demands that readers look harder, stay longer, feel more. But for those who follow his winding syntax to the end, the reward is a haunting clarity, of the faint, stubborn lights of hope that lie beyond the abyss. It is this architecture of apocalypse and his almost monastic faith in language’s capacity to reckon with chaos, “his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art”, that the Nobel Prize in Literature 2025 honoured.

Born in the provincial town of Gyula, Krasznahorkai’s novels reflect Europe’s shifting tectonics. In Sátántangó (1985), adapted into a seven-hour film by Béla Tarr, a collapsing Hungarian village becomes a stage for cyclical delusion. In The Melancholy of Resistance (1989), the arrival of a ghostly circus revives a provincial town’s simmering anxieties. In War and War (1999), a lonely archivist travels to New York in a manic bid to publish a mysterious manuscript that may or may not hold the key to transcending time. In these narratives that unravel more than they resolve, Krasznahorkai, 71, confronts the most elemental of human fears — annihilation, irrelevance, absurdity — and the unschooled insubordination of hope.

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In a world steeped in conflicts and climate crises and a pervasive culture of superficiality, the award to Krasznahorkai comes as a recognition of literature as resistance. It is a reminder that great art is not always immediate, or easy. It demands attention, engagement, even surrender. Sometimes, it lacks the polished graces of the mainstream, the marketable ease of the easily comprehensible. Sometimes, as Krasznahorkai shows, it is a long sentence that leads readers into hearts of darkness, not to be lost, but to witness — and to learn how to endure.