Art of the Western world, especially, has always had a soft spot for suffering. Pain makes for good drama, and artists have long treated misery as their most reliable muse. This is so in the crucifixions depicted in medieval frescoes and in the wastelands of Beckett. In the Bible, Job is stripped of everything but still praises God and hangs on to hope, thus translating agony into proof of faith. The same tendency is seen in literature where hope, even faint and cracked, is given a special seat in the house of despair, as if to suggest that meaning will arrive if we suffer long enough. But what if suffering is not instruction, not even a test; just a constant state of mind? What if the sky never really clears?
Nietzsche said that “to live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.” In newly crowned Nobel Laureate Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s world, however, survival is suspect. His debut novel Satantango takes place (though “place” feels too stable a word) in a nameless, rain-beaten Hungarian village, a hell built out of mud and surrounded by rot. The story moves through 12 chapters, or “dances,” while everyone waits for a saviour, for money and for the end of rain. But Godot never arrives.
These sentences best explain the novel’s mood: “The stench of sewers mixed with mud, puddles, the smell of the odd crack of lightning, wind tugging at tiles, power lines, empty nests; the stifling heat behind low ill-fitting windows impatient, annoyed half-words of lovers embracing . . . demanding wails of babies, their cries sliding off into the tin-smell of dusk; streets pliable, parks soaked to their roots lying obedient to the rain, bare oaks, half-broken dry flowers, scorched grass all prostrate, humbled by the storm, sacrifices strewn at the executioner’s feet.”
The opening image of Satantango is Futaki waking to the sound of bells while rain is hammering the windows. There is a supernatural feel to it. “He gazed sadly at the threatening sky,” the narrator tells us “and suddenly saw on the twig of an acacia... the progress of spring, summer, fall, and winter, as if the whole of time were a frivolous interlude from the much greater spaces of eternity.” The vision is hazy, and Krasznahorkai writes as if God had been gone for centuries and rain has replaced time.
{{/usCountry}}The opening image of Satantango is Futaki waking to the sound of bells while rain is hammering the windows. There is a supernatural feel to it. “He gazed sadly at the threatening sky,” the narrator tells us “and suddenly saw on the twig of an acacia... the progress of spring, summer, fall, and winter, as if the whole of time were a frivolous interlude from the much greater spaces of eternity.” The vision is hazy, and Krasznahorkai writes as if God had been gone for centuries and rain has replaced time.
{{/usCountry}}The novel’s architecture too is extraordinary. Each of its sections moves like a tango. A stranger arrives in a decaying village, offering hope, then disappears, then returns. This structure repeats itself with ritual precision. Each “dance” unfolds in a single, immense paragraph, often 25 pages long.
Another one of his works, The Last Wolf (2018) is a single 70-page sentence. Melancholy of Resistance (1989) is nearly 300 pages without a break. Religious and moral imagery saturates his fiction. The world is described in relentless detail but never explained. No object is too trivial for his attention; everything, from the motion of mud to the angle of light, demands scrutiny. This obsessive style creates its own rhythm of thought. Translator George Szirtes once described it as “wandering in and out of cellars”. We see an event, then see it again from another character’s perspective, as if time itself were turning over.
The novel’s structure resembles a tango as there are six chapters forward, six backward, as if moving were the same as returning. The entire dance seems futile. Futaki is the cynical observer while Irimiás is the false prophet whose return gives the villagers a reason to hope, which is to say, a reason to be deceived. Hope then, is another trick of decay; the mud might dry one day. Early in the novel, the symptoms of despair start showing:
“The weak sunlight only just succeeded in penetrating a jumbled mass of clouds that was slowly proceeding eastwards: the light in the kitchen dimmed as if it were dusk and it was hard to know whether the gently vibrating patches on the wall were merely shadows or symptoms of the despair underlying their faintly hopeful thoughts.”
Krasznahorkai’s Hungary is a post-ideological wreck. The failed collective farm, for example, and the rumour of government funds and the endless waiting makes the book feel like an allegory. The people are abandoned by both God and bureaucracy; the doctor, who spies on his neighbours while drinking himself toward oblivion is almost paradoxical. His is the intellect that sees everything and understands nothing. He reads a geology book that “came alive... though the unknown author’s awkward, unpolished style,” but can’t tell if it predicts the Earth after humanity or recalls a world already extinct.
Here, time is an interesting entity that dilates until every action becomes ritual. The rain, the mud, the drinking, the waiting… these are repeated until repetition becomes the meaning. The reader is reminded of Andrei Tarkovsky’s films that stretch time until it breaks. Tarkovsky once said that art is a “form of prayer,” a statement that is almost comical in this context. In Béla Tarr’s film adaptation of Satantango, a seven-hour monochrome miracle, the camera moves as slowly, as if mimicking Krasznahorkai’s prose. Every frame is soaked in rain, and here rain is not a cleansing force. It only makes way for more filth.
In one passage, the narrator describes the villagers as being eternally exposed in between two times, neither of which is theirs. It’s a perfect description of the book’s metaphysics. The characters live after the end of history but before the end of the world. They are the surplus left when faith has collapsed. Even language begins to rot into “a confusing clatter of night noises”.
Bleakness becomes exhilarating with the language raising you up. The longer the sentence, the lighter the weight. What Walter Benjamin called “the melancholy of the ruins” becomes evident. Krasznahorkai’s world contains no divine order, no rebellion against it, not even the comfort of absurdity. It’s what remains after every illusion of meaning has run its course.
When Irimiás, the supposed saviour returns, the villagers follow him like pilgrims who know the pilgrimage is a scam. He promises redemption through work and a new beginning. “God is not made manifest in language, you dope,” he says. “He’s not manifest in anything. He doesn’t exist.” The line is funny and cruel. The girl Esti, who is small and bruised, is a defenceless character who believes in a universe where everything is wonderful. She is too innocent for this world and when she meets her fate in one of the book’s most harrowing scenes, the village doesn’t notice.
For all its darkness, Satantango is often very funny in how it shows that tragedy, taken seriously enough, becomes absurd. “I dream of light,” Krasznahorkai once said, “but I live in the shadow. That’s why I’m so funny.” Satantango is the foundation of an entire cosmology of books and with it, the author perfected his grammar of ruin. Reading him today feels almost scandalous. He demands the reader’s time and the consequent effect is exhausting. There is a temptation to call Krasznahorkai’s work visionary and apocalyptic, which the Nobel Committee did. Susan Sontag once called him “the master of the apocalypse,” and the phrase fits.
Krasznahorkai’s prose is relentless and often stretches for pages without pause. Long sentences are his religion, since to stop would be to admit a closure, and in this world, closure is a lie. In his obedience to despair, he claims not to write political novels or even allegorical ones, though it is hard not to read his work as allegory. Still, he is not a polemicist and his writing, if anything, resembles a moral inquiry. His world feels perpetually on the verge of collapse. The apocalypse in Krasznahorkai is more psychological with his characters being trapped in obsessive patterns of observation and self-analysis. He writes about the sheer fact of being alive when meaning has drained away. “It was dawn and getting light,” one line goes, “or evening and growing dark... nothing changed outside, it just carried on.”
That’s the book in a sentence.
Pranavi Sharma writes on books and culture. She lives in New Delhi.