Although Krasznahorkai’s narrators often have some intimation of this problem, this usually leads them to become entangled in labyrinths of their own making.

The stories – although calling them stories is somewhat misleading, as they deliberately frustrate the usual conventions of narrative – feature, like most of Krasznahorkai’s writing, narrators who are trapped by the limitations of language and thought in their attempts to apprehend the world. The Universal Theseus was published as a stand-alone work in Hungarian ( Az Általános Theseus, 1993) before being republished in this collection, while the The Bill has been published separately in English (2013) by the Cahiers series. The World Goes On is composed of twenty-one short prose pieces, divided into three sections entitled: ‘He Speaks’, ‘He Narrates’ and ‘He Departs.’ Some of these prose works have appeared elsewhere before. The World Goes On, which has been shortlisted for 2018 Man Booker International Prize, continues to explore these themes, albeit in a less menacing or apocalyptic tone than some of his earlier works. Nevertheless, his is a name that remains shrouded in a certain mystique, due in part to his gnomic responses in interviews, and to the notorious difficulty of his work, with its breathtakingly long sentences and apocalyptic, melancholic themes. Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai has become a more familiar name to English speaking readers over the last few years thanks to his receipt of the Man Booker International Prize in 2015. This is the second of three essays by Horanyi that will appear on the Sydney Review of Books, alongside essays by other fellowship recipients, Robert Wood and Darius Sepehri.

In its measured prose and long, Tolstoyan sentences, ‘Satantango’ is nothing short of a literary masterpiece, a formal meditation on death and avarice, human fallibility and faith.Rita Horanyi is a recipient of a 2017 SRB-CA Emerging Critics Fellowship. Satantango follows the villagers as they are exploited and taken in by Irimias, as they drink and stumble their way toward the gradual realization of their mistake and ultimate demise. He soon attains a messianic aura as he plays on the fears of the townsfolk and a series of increasingly brutal events unfold. Irimias will divide and rule: his arrival heralds the beginning of a period of violence and greed for the villagers as he sets about swindling them out of a fortune that might allow them to escape the emptiness and futility of their existence. But when the charismatic Irimias – long-thought dead – returns to the commune, the villagers fall under his spell.

Flies buzz, spiders weave, water drips and animals root desultorily in the barnyard of a collective farm. In the darkening embers of a Communist utopia, life in a desolate Hungarian town has come to a virtual standstill.

Sátántangó lászló krasznahorkai