Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai (71) has been awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature “for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art”.
“Krasznahorkai is a great epic writer in the central European tradition that extends through Kafka to Thomas Bernhard, and is characterised by absurdism and grotesque excess,” the Nobel jury said. “But there are more strings to his bow, and he soon looks to the East in adopting a more contemplative, finely calibrated tone. The result is a string of works inspired by the deep-seated impressions left by his journeys to China and Japan.”
He previously won the Man Booker International Prize in 2015 for what the judges said were “magnificent works of deep imagination and complex passions, in which the human comedy verges painfully on to transcendence”.
Colm Tóibín set up his Tuskar Rock imprint with his agent Peter Straus to publish Krasznahorkai and other authors who they felt were being ignored by British publishers.
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“It was a scandal that László Krasznahorkai was not being published at all, beyond belief, so we simply sought to rectify this,” he told me last month. He said in 2010, “For him, the sentence is an act of pure performance – a tense high-wire act, a piece of grave and ambitious vaudeville performed with energy both comic and ironic. Prose for him is a complex vehicle moving through a world both real and surreal with considerable precision and sharpness,” he said.
What to read
Krasznahorkai first gained recognition in 1985 when he published Satantango, which he later adapted for a 1994 film with Hungarian film-maker Béla Tarr, a seven-hour-plus epic about the decline of communism in eastern Europe shot in black and white. First published in English in 2012, it is the story of a destitute group on an abandoned collective farm in Hungary countryside just before the fall of communism, who are taken in by the return of the charismatic Irimiás and his crony Petrina, who were believed by all to be dead.
“I seriously reckon that there is a very advanced sphere of literature, high literature so to speak, that serves as a force against decay,” Krasznahorkai told Hungarian daily newspaper Nepszabadsag.
Critic Susan Sontag called Krasznahorkai contemporary literature’s “master of the apocalypse” after reading his second book The Melancholy of Resistance (1998), a feverish horror fantasy played out in a small Hungarian town nestled in a Carpathian valley. The novel won the German Bestenliste Prize for the best literary work of the year in 1993 and the author also won Hungary’s highest literary award – the Kossuth Prize.
Writing in The Irish Times in 2002, critic AL Kennedy said: “The Melancholy of Resistance by Laszlo Krasznahorkai is a masterpiece of point of view writing and pelting along – courtesy of the most insane sentence structures I’ve ever come across. It’s funny, tragic, disturbing and deeply joyful – often simultaneously and its translator (the wonderful George Szirtes) should get a medal of some kind.”
In 2017, the late Irish Times literary correspondent Eileen Battersby wrote: “The linguistic energy of Joyce is apparent as are the cautionary vision of Kafka and the bleak humour of Beckett, yet Krasznahorkai is an original and the undisputed laureate of our deranged and increasingly vulnerable epoch. Satantango and The Melancholy of Resistance are irresistible, unforgettable and required reading.”
Herscht 07769 (2024) has been described as a great contemporary German novel for its accurate portrayal of the country’s social unrest. Set in a small town in Thüringen, Germany, which is afflicted by social anarchy, murder and arson, the terror of the novel plays out against the backdrop of Johann Sebastian Bach’s powerful legacy, so violence and beauty are “impossibly” conjoined.
The Nobel Prize, considered the most prestigious literary prize in the world, is worth 11 million Swedish krona (€967,470). The prize is judged by the Swedish Academy, made up of 18 distinguished Swedish writers, linguists, literary scholars and historians. Nominations are invited each year from academics and literary organisations worldwide. A longlist of 15-20 writers and then a shortlist of five is selected. The award ceremony takes place on December 10th in Stockholm.
Last year’s winner was South Korean author Han Kang, best known for her novel The Vegetarian, which won the inaugural Man Booker International Prize for fiction in 2016, and only the 18th woman of the 120 literature laureates since 1901.
There have been four Irish winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature: William Butler Yeats in 1923; George Bernard Shaw in 1925; Samuel Beckett in 1969; and Seamus Heaney in 1995.
