Krasznahorkai László

[Rumpelstilzchen]

More interesting facts on the man and his work as well as on translations issues:

James Wood in the New Yorker: Madness and Civilization, The very strange fictions of Laszlo Krasznahorkai
(the article can apparently be read online without any New Yorker subscription, this did not work in the past, interesting...)

David Auerbach in the Quarterly Conversation: The Mythology of László Krasznahorkai

Two quotes that I find interesting:

James Wood about War and War:

For all these reasons, this is one of the most profoundly unsettling experiences I have had as a reader. By the end of the novel, I felt that I had got as close as literature could possibly take me to the inhabiting of another person, and, in particular, the inhabiting of a mind in the grip of "war and war" - a mind not without visions of beauty but also one that is utterly lost in its own boiling, incommunicable fictions, its own grotesquely fertile pain.

David Auerbach on why he thinks that K's vision in Melancholy of Resistance is much more universal than a communist allegory:

These analogies are not meant to be precise; the point is that Krasznahorkai's approach undermines the exactitude of philosophy, thus entering the realm of mythology, half-spiritual and half-real. Philosophy's explanations, by which I mean rational conceptualizations, cannot sit next to chaos. It is only mythology that can make space for the chaos of the Prince and see that existence is not merely a contest of competing orders and ideas but the chronicle of how those orders are temporarily imposed onto a brute chaos that endlessly resists them.
Though many novels are praised for diagnosing the malaise of our time (isolation, capitalism, inauthenticity, suburbia, etc.), Krasznahorkai's books illuminate why their explanations are so often trite. Their authors are frequently trapped in the same myopia as the society they supposedly critique, dispatching received ideas whose premises they do not question, whose premises arise from a lack of questioning the greater conceptual schemas which are seen to fail in The Melancholy of Resistance. For those who believe that in 20 years time Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections will seem as dated as Norman Mailer's or Sinclair Lewis's lesser efforts do today, Krasznahorkai provides a more universal fictional landscape.

With respect to the universality of Melancholy of Resistance also W. G. Sebald's quote comes to mind (please excuse me, the quote is already quite overused, but since it is so often presented without the important reference to this particular book):

This is a book about a world into which the Leviathan returned. The universality of its vision rivals that of Gogol's Dead Souls and far surpasses all the lesser concerns of contemporary writing.

And finally here is a very interesting quote from a review of Animalinside in the Quarterly Conversation by Christiane Craig, about a reading of Animalinside by the author himself:

And precisely so, during an open event celebrating the publication of The Cahiers Series’ Animalinside at the American University of Paris, selections from the text are read aloud. On the date, Krasznahorkai is serene, cheerful. He sits cross-legged, speaks very little, is a silvery and reluctant man, a quiet smiler. He is, on the whole, reticent, merry but remote, except when the moment arrives to read from Animalinside in the Hungarian, which he seems to relish. In fact, he is a very talented lector and there is a slippery, contained calm in his reading. I was especially struck by how his modulations in Hungarian compared or, rather, did not compare to the English translation when read aloud. The Hungarian was less inflected, characterized by a sort of cold boiling, while the English was always, so it seemed, springing forwards and outwards, demonstrative. But then perhaps English does best lend itself to inflection and to demonstration. It was strange in any case to hear the certain, spoken disparity between the two texts and to begin then to understand how much the way a text feels is so necessarily altered by the work of translation, not for lack of accuracy or talent on the part of the translator but for the sheer, tactual difference between languages. For example, the translated text, through the English and its requisite pronunciations, expresses a kind of perpetual “lunging,” while otherwise, the Hungarian original is gathered, and so to say, poised. It does not ptyalize or molest as the English does, it threatens and even promises pain, horror, in a voice, gleeful, and that yet softly tinkles, like a cat bell. The Hungarian is perhaps more calamitous for exactly this reason: all along it is, just as Krasznahorkai reads it, smiling.

 

[Daniel del Real]

Oh no! Here as well? You won't rest until everyone has read this guy don't ya?

 

[kpjayan]

..... It is because of this, I bought the 'Melancholy of Resistence' and I'm happy that I did. Please continue... I am too tempted to pay money for War&War.
Oliver hasn't stopped talking about 'primeval and ...'
It is because of you ,Daniel, that I have this 6 books of Roberto Bolano.. No regret so far..

 

[Caodang]

I am so strongly tempted to pay for "Satanstango" as well

 

[Rumpelstilzchen]

I should ask his agent to give me some money for gathering new readers

 

[Daniel del Real]

..... It is because of this, I bought the 'Melancholy of Resistence' and I'm happy that I did. Please continue... I am too tempted to pay money for War&War.
Oliver hasn't stopped talking about 'primeval and ...'
It is because of you ,Daniel, that I have this 6 books of Roberto Bolano.. No regret so far..

I know Jayan, I'm just messing around with this guy

I should ask his agent to give me some money for gathering new readers

Yes, you're doing a great job pal, actually I have decided a date already to start War & War: it will be my first book in March

 

[Rumpelstilzchen]

His webpage got a new face:
http://www.krasznahorkai.hu/

(seems to be still under construction at the moment, not all pages are ready yet)

As a bonus a lot of information can be found like:

- Nem kérdez, nem válaszol, New book with interviews to be published in Hungarian in 2012
- Seiobo, English translation due in 2013
- Theatrical adaptation of Satantango upcoming in Paris
- Reading tour New York, Washington, San Francisco in June/July 2012

 

[Daniel del Real]

I just checked his official page and in the forthcoming books section, a translation of Seiobo to Spanish is announced for 2013, same year than the English translation.
I just finished War & War last night and well... a lot of things have to settle down before I can make up my mind about the novel. What I can tell is that he is an author you just cannot get out of your brain, you keep wondering about many things from the novel, the author or the context. I will also read Isaiah has come today so I can complete the reading experience along with the material available at the web page. A VERY DIFFERENT reading experience let me tell you.

 

[Daniel del Real]

In a further exploration to better comprehend War & War, I researched for information about Mario Merz and found a lot of connections to LK and his characters:

He experimented with a continuous graphic stroke–not removing his pencil point from the paper. He explored the relationship between nature and the subject

So here we have the continuous graphic stroke for Merz, then the continuous flowing of Krasznahorkai's long sentences and of course we cannot forget the continuous shots from Bella Tarr's movies.
Also, the relationship between nature and the subject plays a very important role in the novel.

Now, I can see how influential was Merz for LK's work as this can also explain the short story from Seiobo that Rumpy talked about:

Many of his installations were accented with words or numbers in neon. The numbers counted off the Fibonacci progression, the mathematical formula (named for the Italian monk and mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci who discovered it) for growth patterns found in many forms of life, including leaves, snail shells, pine cones and reptile skins

Merz became fascinated by architecture: he admired the skyscraper-builders of New York City; his father was an architect; and his art thereby conveys a sensitivity for the unity of space and the human residing therein. He made big spaces feel human, intimate and natural. He was intrigued by the powerful (Wagner, D’annunzio) as well as the small (a seed that will generate a tree or the shape of a leaf) and applied both to his drawing.

 

[Rumpelstilzchen]

Interesting Daniel, thanks for this, I never thought about checking out this Merz guy. cool.

 

[liehtzu]

But isn't this Krasznahorkai fellow just a kind of Hungarian Thomas Bernhard, without the fun?






Once I said, a long time ago, “sigh…if only I learned how to write like Chekhov, stories like that, theatrical works like Anton Chekhov’s. Then someone said to me, “But that already exists! It’s not lacking. Write what Chekhov transmitted to you, about his world, his movement and rhythm, his quality, and above all about his shaking.” One time I said a great writer closes his path to his successors, but only so they can find their own. Or he is the opposite of someone like Thomas Bernhard, who is easy to imitate, really. A writer who is easy to imitate, deep down, does not deserve to be called a writer.

-Peter Handke, in an interview

 

[Rumpelstilzchen]

Related to Daniel's post on the Recently Finished Books thread:

The author on the origins of War and War and the purpose of the Isaiah Has Come text:
"It was one of those cases that you describe as lasting just a single moment, but in this case this is indeed what happened – a single moment of fright, that’s all, arriving for no explicable reason at all, departing for no explicable reason at all, and leaving behind nothing but a shadow, and in this shadow, encircled by the night brightness of Kurfürstendamm, there was an unexpected, fierce, poignant vision: a couple of people running for life in timeless devastation and meanwhile taking stock of all that they have to say good-bye to. The book I started to write in 1992 rests on this vision, and given the feeling I had while working on it that there were less and less people who would grasp the meaning of a vision like mine, from 1996 on I tried to get in touch with them. I had been writing messages for two years and dividing them into separate sentences I had them published in literary journals. Then in 1998 I sent a kind of a last message, a story forwarded as a letter and entitled Megjött Ézsaiás /Isaiah has come/ in which the future hero described the roots, origin and spirit of the novel announced to be published the following year."

And this one as already quoted further above:
"I was determined to send a message to my kind, lonely, weary and sensitive readers, namely that the work in progress was/would be about them. I began to publish single sentences at a time in three carefully chosen periodicals, and in doing so I wanted to send a signal to those readers who I thought would recognise that the sentences were intended for them. I had no message for readers who were not kind, not lonely, not weary nor sensitive, and I never will have."

 

[Daniel del Real]

OK, so this text came in to identify the readers and send them a message. Isaiah has come, has a way more dense feeling of doom and decay than War & War, that deploys many time in trying to explain beauty, always followed by a failed hope personified by Mastemann.

 

[Rumpelstilzchen]

Isaiah has come, has a way more dense feeling of doom and decay than War & War, that deploys many time in trying to explain beauty, always followed by a failed hope personified by Mastemann.

Yes, isn't it sad how Korin is desperately looking for a way out of the mess the world is in, how he tries to find the beauty, value and meaning in the world, how he always gets kicked in the teeth and has to see how all of the beauty gets sucked under by chaos and destruction.

 

[Daniel del Real]

Yes, isn't it sad how Korin is desperately looking for a way out of the mess the world is in, how he tries to find the beauty, value and meaning in the world, how he always gets kicked in the teeth and has to see how all of the beauty gets sucked under by chaos and destruction.

Totally get you, from the second time and on I got desperate every time Mastemann came in to scene. From then I was always expecting to face him with nothing else to do to avoid it. Terrible sense of despair.

 

[Rumpelstilzchen]

To whet your appetite, here are some online reviews of Satantango:

Hungarian Literature Online (an older review by the Kertesz translator Wilkinson)
The New Inquiry
The Complete Review
Vertigo
The Millions
The L Magazine
Full Stop
[URL=http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/books/review/laszlo-krasznahorkais-satantango.html]New York Times
[/URL]

 

[Rumpelstilzchen]

David Auerbach's (Mr. Waggish, http://www.waggish.org/ ) short but emphatic applause for K. and Satantango (posted at amazon):

I'll start by confessing that I have written on Krasznahorkai for years and on the basis of The Melancholy of Resistance and his other books, I consider him one of the greatest contemporary writers.

Satantango was Krasznahorkai's first novel, published in 1985 but only translated now into English. I've read Satantango in French but I don't know Hungarian, so I can only say that Szirtes seems to have done as wonderful a job here as he did with Melancholy.

Satantango is the story of a tiny rural Hungarian village and its miserable, static inhabitants. A drunk doctor, a barman, farmers, and a few others have affairs and go about their lives. A certain tragedy strikes, and simultaneously a (very) false prophet named Irimias appears to play havoc in the tragedy's aftermath. It is a simple story, made complex by a precise, nightmarish build-up of small, unsettling details and destabilizing loops of prose that makes you feel like the very basis of reality is falling apart, reflecting the condition of the villagers.

The prose is thick and miasmic, though not as labyrinthine as Krasznahorkai's subsequent work. There is more acute cruelty in this book, in contrast to the sublime chaos that takes over in Melancholy of Resistance. Here is the doctor sitting by his window, watching the others:

"He had had to amass and arrange, in the most serviceable positions possible, the objects indispensable for eating, drinking, smoking, diary-writing, reading and countless other trifling tasks, and even had to renounce allowing the occasional error to go unpunished out of self-indulgence pure and simple."

Those who have a great affection for other voices of chaos and fracture, like Kleist and Kafka and Beckett, should read Krasznahorkai. I would rank him among them. His long sentences get compared to Thomas Bernhard, but Krasznahorkai is much more metaphysical, much less psychological. (Only Bernhard's Correction bears any real resemblance to Krasznahorkai's work.)

The fantastic Hungarian director Bela Tarr filmed Satantango (it's 7 1/2 hours long): I would recommend reading the book first, however, because the film adaptation makes excisions and alterations that are better appreciated with knowledge of the book.

And Scott Esposito twittered that he is writing an essay about the 4 books available in English. Looking forward...

 

[Rumpelstilzchen]

For those understanding German, I just found the laudatory speech for the prize he got together with his translator for the Seiobo book. A few aspects of the book are discussed.

And the animal made it to Australia:
Overwhelmed by the beast within

And further news: I have heard more rumors that a new book of fiction is in the pipeline, it seems to be a collection of short stories (and/or essays maybe) with something like "The World Ahead" as title (in Hungarian in 2012 and German in 2013?).

 

[Liam]

While I am grateful to you for gathering together all this info on LK, I'm a little tired of reading about what other people have to say about him and his books. Where is your analysis, what do you think of his novels? Why don't you do a little write up, please? Just a suggestion. Liehtzu might be on to something in # 51, but I wish he'd offer more comprehensive reasons for NOT reading LK. And I won't argue his (or, rather Handke's) point about Thomas Bernhard. I read one book by Bernhard and was bored, although it wasn't as silly as I expected it to be.

 

[Rumpelstilzchen]

I wrote a bit here and there in between in the past, in the 'recently finished' or 'currently reading' threads, I think. Not really in this thread here, true, ok a few sentences about Seiobo...

I would love to, but the time, the time. My posts and links to other people's opinions are mostly the outcome of my coffee breaks or lazy minutes of web browsing in office. Most of my time is taken by the write-up of my dissertation unfortunately and it is very likely that I will not have time at all for such stuff during the next weeks.

I think Liehtzu gave a longer argument in the last Nobel discussion for why he does not like K.'s books. As far as I got it his opinion was based on one book only, though, the Melancholy of Resistance, but I could be wrong there. Here are the links to his posts:
http://www.worldliteratureforum.com...Literature-2011-Speculation?p=98633#post98633
http://www.worldliteratureforum.com...Literature-2011-Speculation?p=98684#post98684
http://www.worldliteratureforum.com...Literature-2011-Speculation?p=98747#post98747

To be honest, I do not think he his on to anything in post 51 but the very old Handke-Bernhard feud, see also Daniel's and my posts in the Handke thread. Handke hates Bernhard for whatever personal reasons. Bernhard is a literary giant beyond any dispute in German speaking countries. Liehtzu's quite provocative sentence about K. only proves that he has not read K. in any detail. And to be honest, I personally find the method of his post not very constructive, i.e. to first make an insupportable (and rather nonsensical, sorry) statement about K. and then apparently try to discount K. indirectly on basis of this statement by setting it into relation to this stupid Handke quote. It is pure provocation, nothing more, therefore it was rightfully ignored, I would say, but let me know if you think otherwise.