As I've already mentioned, I do have the habit of buying more than one or two (or more!) books by an author without having read anything due to reviews and ratings. Krazsnahorkai sits firmly at the top of this pile since I've bought most of his back catalogue (maybe its a sickness!) This is his first book, a darkly comic, dreadnought of a book where you are submerged into a dysfunctional village community embroiled in mutual loathing and suspicion. The world of Satantango is apocalyptic and isolated, where everything is rotting and in disrepair. The sullen inhabitants of the nameless village are shackled by their inertia as they wait akin to Beckett's characters in 'Waiting for Godot' for their fortunes to change. And it is with the return of the supposedly dead Iriamas that the promise of change presents itself. Like a devilish and untrustworthy pied piper, he leads the villagers-come-minions on a merry dance from their rainy doldrums with promises of a redemptive future.

Satantango was ok. It is perhaps a book for the purists of literature and is highly acclaimed in literary circles. For me, it treaded the line between 'the Emperor's New Clothes' and highlighting my own intellectual inadequacies. I enjoyed certain parts of the novel and Krasznahorkai certainly builds a masterful world which consumes the reader and oozes from the page. What I didn't like however, was the modernist meta narrative which underpinned the novel; I didn't particularly find it clever or a satisfying denouement to the dense and bleak text that I'd trudged through t get there. I wanted more from the plot and was left disappointed and frustrated (which I fear was the reaction the author sought in his reader). As a fine art graduate, I appreciate artists who push boundaries and perhaps if I read this when it was written I would have a greater appreciation of Satantango but part of me still feels that Krazsnahorkai didn't quite pull off his intention skilfully enough. I hope my opinion of his work hasn't become too tainted because like I mentioned, I have a fair few of his others to get through! ( )

"The taller of the two men assures his companion, saying, “The two clocks say different times, but it could be that neither of them is right. Our clock here,” he continues, pointing to the one above them with his long, slender and refined index finger, “is very late, while that one there measures not so much time as, well, the eternal reality of the exploited, and we to it are as the bough of a tree to the rain that falls upon it: in other words we are helpless.”" Set in a Hungarian village after the fall of communism, the villagers are poor and struggling. This is no an easy read - both the style (long sentences and no paragraphs (hence the lack of a space between the quote and the review)- although there are at least chapters) and the contents. It is extremally leak and the physical layout definitely added to the stifling atmosphere created in the book. I feel like this is the kind of book best read a few pages at a time - I definitely found my mind starting to wander off with the sentences if I didn't focus hard enough. ( )

The epigraph by Kafka is illuminating: the influence is everywhere in this mysterious and bleak novel, especially in the section near the end where bureaucrats are attempting to translate each character into official government idiom. There is also some of Beckett's absurdism, and the tone is very 19th century Russian, especially Dostoevsky. The girl Esti echoes Stinking Lizaveta in the Brothers Karamazov, as a kind of human symbol of suffering.

The religious aspect of the story is most striking. The residents of the farm collective are trapped in a type of purgatory, as they wait for Irimias to arrive and redeem them. There is a Mary Magdalene character (Mrs. Schmidt), and Irimias supposedly returns from the dead, which is never fully explained. At the end, the characters are spread to the wind by Irimias as they wait for paradise to come at the manor, much like Jesus' disciples are scattered to spread the word of the Gospel.

Which makes me wonder about the title and the source of evil in the story. The doctor at the end is writing the novel as it cycles back to the beginning, and it is notable that he along with Esti's family are the only characters left behind at the collective. The symbol of the bell ringing at the beginning of the end was evocative, especially once the doctor finds out that it is just an "idiot" making the noise (Macbeth allusion?). The doctor returns to his chair, his drinking, and his writing. He embodies the malaise that trapped the other characters in the village. That he is writing the story means that he has some omniscience and power over the characters' lives. The tango in the title is the drunken dance the characters do as they wait in the bar for Irimias. This time loop is the trap that Satan has sprung for them. The book is saying that, although the Christ-figure is probably also a con man, and his promises of paradise are lies, the real evil is in the debauched stasis of the character's lives before his arrival.

Just my interpretation. ( )

Si tratta di un libro denso, faticoso, fangoso come il contesto abitato dai suoi personaggi. Si respirano insieme attesa e disperazione, in un progressivo calare nell’abisso in cui i personaggi si muovono. Alcuni momenti sono davvero memorabili, così come le atmosfere. È uno di quei libri che lasciano attaccate profondamente addosso sensazioni, in questo caso certo non positive. E comunque in questo sta la sua forza. Mi incuriosisce molto il film che ne ha tratto Béla Tarr, anche se non è facile trovare il coraggio di affrontarne le sette ore.
( )

Review published in the LA Review of Books: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/dancing-with-the-devil-laszlo-krasznahorkais...

On Monday, July 2, László Krasznahorkai read before a considerably rapt crowd at the Housing Works Bookstore in Manhattan. The Hungarian writer read from Satantango and spoke about his elliptical and enigmatic prose style, offering the following anecdote when asked about his long-winded and often maddening sentences: "Everyone knows that the dot belongs not to human beings but the dot belongs to the gods. The gods will get the last dot." As Satantango deals with people's reactions to promises of hope and salvation, Krasznahorkai's comments during the question-and-answer period underscore a major concerns in this novel: "I'm not interested to believe in something, but to understand the people who believe."

The epigraph to Satantango – Krasznahorkai's first novel, published in Hungarian in 1985, and this year by New Directions in an impeccable English translation by poet George Szirtes – is from Kafka's The Castle: "In that case, I'll miss the thing by waiting for it." This sets the tone for the novel's perverse, absurdist humanity and desolation. Fans of Krasznahorkai's other books published in English – The Melancholy of Resistance (1989/2002) and War & War (1999/2006) – may have seen the impressive Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr's seven-plus hour film adaptation from 1994, but for most this is a first encounter. It is set on a rundown estate near an abandoned mill, just after the end of communist rule. Depravity abounds; the young girls living there have taken to prostitution; getting drunk and swindling one's neighbors are the only ways to pass the time. And yet, everyone is waiting for something without knowing it, whether an end or a new beginning. Do they miss the thing by waiting for it?

The very first sentence of the novel highlights Krasznahorkai's inimitable prose (deliberate omission of commas replicated below) as well as the dark sense of foreboding with which all the characters grapple:

One morning near the end of October not long before the first drops of the mercilessly long autumn rains began to fall on the cracked and saline soil on the western side of the estate (later the stinking yellow sea of mud would render footpaths impassable and put the town too beyond reach) Futaki woke to hear bells.

The same bells are remarked upon by the doctor, a drunk who has retreated into his apartment and his books. Although neither Futaki nor the doctor realize it, the bells are signs of the "resurrection" of Irimi's, who vanished from the estate some eighteen months before and had long been considered dead. The plot of Satantango is too simple – or too complex, depending on how one reads the novel – to reduce here without giving some critical element away. Krasznahorkai's ambiguous use of metaphors and symbols is compounded by his odd juxtaposition of opposites – darkness and light, salvation and damnation, or, as a chapter title puts it, "Heavenly Vision? Hallucination?" Alongside the never-ending rain, the "metalled" road is Satantango's most ambiguous metaphor, signifying less a link to civilization than a reminder of it, and nearly each character makes reference to the road as if measuring his or her space in time and ruin by their relation to it.

The metalled road at times figures as the most stable configuration on the crumbling estate, and at others as simply another place to be lost. In one scene, the drunken doctor, heading to the bar to refresh his liquor supply, runs into the young Esti Horgos. She clings to him briefly, craving human contact she does not get at home, and then runs away: "He stepped onto the metalled road and shouted out in the darkness. 'Esti! I won't harm you! Have you gone mad?! Come back here at once!' There was no answer." This brief moment of shared intimacy between a lonely hermit and a young girl teetering on the edge comes at the cost of losing their way: the doctor "turned back and was astounded to observe that he seemed to have moved a long way from the bar. He started toward it but after a couple of steps the whole world went dark in an instant and he felt his legs sliding in the mud." The word "dark" and its variants, as in the two quotes above, occur 76 times throughout the novel.

Krasznahorkai structures Satantango as a Möbius strip, rendering topologically the movement from isolation to a more collective identity in the middle of the novel, hinging on Irimis's return and young Esti's tragic death. The story buckles and spirals back on itself while still remaining intact – frayed, perhaps, chaotic, in as well as outside of time, maddened and utterly exhausted, yet somehow stoically in one piece. This movement is crucial to the novel, as well as to Krasznahorkai's analysis of individual and group psychology. As Jacques Lacan reminds us, the Möbius strip allows us to see how "that which is interpersonal (conscious and spoken) is connected to that which is intrapsychic (unconscious and pre-spoken)," thus "indicating how an 'inside' (the unconscious) has continuity with an 'outside' (the conscious)." This continuity is exactly what Krasznahorkai is exploring so ambitiously in Satantango. When the resurrected Irimias – perhaps savior, perhaps devil – gives a speech that brings the community together in a state of hope (or delusion), it is eerily reminiscent of what Freud says of group psychology: "The impulses which a group obeys may according to circumstances be generous or cruel, but they are always so imperious that no personal interest, not even that of self-preservation, can make itself felt."

Esti's death and Irimias's speech rally the residents together, and a particular kind of group psychology takes over. For example, "the kid" who joins Irimis and his sidekick, Petrina, realizes that he must shed his personal identity and mimic "the master" in order to be accepted: "It was perfectly clear to him that his own best option was faithfully to copy Irimis in every small detail because this way he was sure not to get a nasty surprise."

The living spaces are overrun with spiderwebs and yet, as the barkeeper says, they "never once saw an actual spider." It was as if the spiders sensed the bartender "watching them, and they simply wouldn't appear. Even after he had resigned himself to the situation he still hoped – just once – to set eyes on one of them." All the characters – from Futazi to the beautiful and unfaithful Mrs. Schmidt, from the local driver, who has last seen Irimis whom they all await, to the hyper-religious Mrs. Halics – are caught in the web of whomever orchestrates what transpires, be it Irimis the redeemer, Irimis the destroyer, or, not to ruin the final turn of Krasznahorkai's spiraling narrative, a more absent figure who suggests the travails and torments involved in the storytelling process.

A drunken dance, a Satanic tango, prefaces the backward structural twist in Satantango's Möbius strip. In the space of the dance, the community comes together to experience the trauma of Esti's death and the return of Irimias; with the backward spiral in the second half of the narrative, we see the individuals revert to their prior state of isolation and alienation. The dance embodies Krasznahorkai's mix of dark comedy and crippling sense of anxiety: the dance is celebratory and funeral, hopeful and despairing. The dance is also the point at which Krasznahorkai begins numbering his chapters backward: we begin at one and progress to six, at which point six is repeated and the journey back to one is recommenced along the Möbius's turn – six being the number of the wild beast, judgment, and also mankind.

The virile voice of Irimias blames them all and none of them – "I am not accusing any particular person of anything and yet ... let me put this question to you: are we not all to blame?" – a perverse acknowledgment of collective complicity or else a brazen refutation of it, or, better, an ambiguous combination of the two. Indeed, it is at this point that the narrative cleaves, becoming Bosch-meets-Beckett in a nightmarish scene at which even words fail to function, melt: "itwasneithermorningnoreveningitjust carriedondawnnortwilightwhichever..."

Self-preservation is subsumed by a more blatant desire for acceptance, despite a host of characters spectacularly selfish and greedy. What does the tension between community and alienation mean for individuals living in limbo, on the cusp of some indefinable and intangible world while still visually reminded – and the metalled road reappears to underscore this point – of the shackles of their lives under communism? Krasznahorkai handles this question deftly, but he never attempts to answer it one way or the other. His textual ambiguities make any concrete reading of Satantango nearly impossible, and we are put in the same befuddled, liminal state of mind as the fictional residents themselves: missing the thing by waiting for it. ( )