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This title in other editions

Satantango

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Satantango Cover

ISBN13: 9780811217347
ISBN10: 0811217345
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Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

Already famous as the inspiration for the filmmaker Béla Tarr's six-hour masterpiece, Satantango is proof, as the spellbinding, bleak, and hauntingly beautiful book has it, that "the devil has all the good times."

The story of Satantango, spread over a couple of days of endless rain, focuses on the dozen remaining inhabitants of an unnamed isolated hamlet: failures stuck in the middle of nowhere. Schemes, crimes, infidelities, hopes of escape, and above all trust and its constant betrayal are Krasznahorkai's meat. "At the center of Satantango," George Szirtes has said, "is the eponymous drunken dance, referred to here sometimes as a tango and sometimes as a csardas. It takes place at the local inn where everyone is drunk.... Their world is rough and ready, lost somewhere between the comic and tragic, in one small insignificant corner of the cosmos. Theirs is the dance of death."

"You know," Mrs. Schmidt, a pivotal character, tipsily confides, "dance is my one weakness."

Review:

"I love Krasznahorkai's books. His long, meandering sentences enchant me, and even if his universe appears gloomy, we always experience that transcendence which to Nietzsche represented metaphysical consolation." The Quarterly Review

Review:

"Krasznahorkai is the contemporary Hungarian master of the apocalypse who inspires comparisons with Gogol and Melville." Imre Kertesz

Review:

"The universality of his vision rivals that of Dead Souls and far surpasses all the lesser concerns of contemporary writing." Susan Sontag

Review:

"The serpentine motion that is neither progress nor repetition, the forward and backward steps of the 'tango' explicitly structure Satantango." Critical Mob

Review:

"He is obsessed as much with the extremes of language as he is with the extremes of thought, with the very limits of people and systems in a world gone mad — and it is hard not to be compelled by the haunting clarity of his vision." New York Times Book Review

Review:

"What prevents Satantango from devolving into a mere exercise in clever derivation, however, is Krasznahorkai's fervent mission to thoroughly mine the mysteriousness, and potential miraculousness, of a seemingly corrupt physical reality. His wry, snake-like sentences produce — or unspool — layer upon layer of psychological insight, metaphysical revelation, and macroscopic historical perspective." Adam Levy, The Millions

Review:

"His prose is formed like a fractal: self-similar patterns where every sentence exceeds its topological dimensions to become a microcosm of the entire work. We definitely hear Beckett in him." The L Magazine

Review:

"Like something far down the periodic table of elements, Krasznahorkai's sentences are strange, elusive, frighteningly radioactive. They seek to replicate the entropic whirl of consciousness itself and, in the case of Eszter, to stop its 'onward rush' entirely." Jacob Silverman

Review:

"On occasion, Krasznahorkai's sentences seem to swell and deflate; each clause seems to twist in its own direction. His sentences are, by turns, lovely, brutal, bombastic, ironic, and precise." Bookslut

Review:

"Think of Satantango, then, as an Eastern European blues album that looks to affirm the coarse texture of life rather than auto-tune it into something smoother or more amendable to wish fulfillment." Full Stop Magazine

Review:

"A writer without comparison, László Krasznahorkai plunges into the subconscious where this moral battle takes place, and projects it into a mythical, mysterious, and irresistible work of post-modern fiction, a novel certain to hold a high rank in the canon of Eastern European literature." Salon

Review:

"Whether he's inside the minds and machinations of his characters' scheming heads, tramping through the muddy streets from one ruined destination to another, or speculating on the value of existence under such Godless conditions, Krasznahorkai proves himself to be capable of bringing anything to life, and Satantango's pages are teeming with it." The Daily Beast

Review:

"László Krasznahorkai's novel Satantango is an argument for the vitality of translation. It is bold, dense, difficult, and utterly unforgettable." The Coffin Factory

Synopsis:

At long last, twenty-five years after the Hungarian genius László Krasznahorkai burst onto the scene with his first novel, Satantango dances into English in a beautiful translation by George Szirtes.
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About the Author

László Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, Hungary, in 1954 and lives in the hills of Szentlászló, Hungary. He has written several novels and won numerous prizes, including Best Book of the Year in Germany in 1993 for The Melancholy of Resistance and the 2010 Brücke Berlin Prize for Seiobo. His other books include Animalinside, Satantango, and War and War.

The famed translator George Szirtes has won the T. S. Eliot and Faber prizes for his poetry.

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What Our Readers Are Saying

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Average customer rating based on 3 comments:
George Carroll, January 30, 2013 (view all comments by George Carroll)
There's no one writing like Krasznahorkai in any language. That his books have been so slow to release in English is a tragedy. Satantango, written in the mid 1980s, is pertinent and current. Dark, apocalyptic, and ... beautiful. George Szirtes did an amazing job of translation.
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kevinelliottchi, January 1, 2013 (view all comments by kevinelliottchi)
2012 saw the long-awaited translation of Karsznahorkai’s first novel from Hungarian into English. It is not an easy book, but it is a book that transports the reader. Hunks of text with little break for paragraph or breath tell the story of a backwater Hungarian village, nearly destroyed, with only the few tragically faithful left. Despair is thick. Alcohol is always flowing. Faith ebbs and flows and the book at times reads like a chorus of Vladimir and Estragons. In the end, the reader has taken the journey from nowhere to unknown (and back again) and the outcome is an examination of both human nature and the nature of faith. If there was one reason for more translated literature in America that came out in 2012, this is it.
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geo, July 31, 2012 (view all comments by geo)
Hooray! I'm the first customer to review Satantango!

Laszlo Krasznahorkai is one of the most creative, remarkable writers of our time. Written in 1985, just translated into English by the wonderful George Szirtes, this book is a masterpiece. Buy it now. Read it soon.

The first line should convince you:
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)m Futaki woke to hear bells.
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Product Details

ISBN:
9780811217347
Author:
Krasznahorkai, Laszlo
Publisher:
New Directions Publishing Corporation
Translator:
Szirtes, George
Subject:
Literary
Subject:
Literature-A to Z
Copyright:
2012
Publication Date:
20120331
Binding:
HARDCOVER
Language:
English
Pages:
320
Dimensions:
8 x 5.38 in
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Related Subjects

Featured Titles » General
Fiction and Poetry » Literature » A to Z

Satantango New Hardcover
0 stars - 0 reviews
$25.95 In Stock
Product details 320 pages New Directions Publishing Corporation - English 9780811217347 Reviews:
"Review" by , "I love Krasznahorkai's books. His long, meandering sentences enchant me, and even if his universe appears gloomy, we always experience that transcendence which to Nietzsche represented metaphysical consolation."
"Review" by , "Krasznahorkai is the contemporary Hungarian master of the apocalypse who inspires comparisons with Gogol and Melville."
"Review" by , "The universality of his vision rivals that of Dead Souls and far surpasses all the lesser concerns of contemporary writing."
"Review" by , "The serpentine motion that is neither progress nor repetition, the forward and backward steps of the 'tango' explicitly structure Satantango."
"Review" by , "He is obsessed as much with the extremes of language as he is with the extremes of thought, with the very limits of people and systems in a world gone mad — and it is hard not to be compelled by the haunting clarity of his vision."
"Review" by , "What prevents Satantango from devolving into a mere exercise in clever derivation, however, is Krasznahorkai's fervent mission to thoroughly mine the mysteriousness, and potential miraculousness, of a seemingly corrupt physical reality. His wry, snake-like sentences produce — or unspool — layer upon layer of psychological insight, metaphysical revelation, and macroscopic historical perspective."
"Review" by , "His prose is formed like a fractal: self-similar patterns where every sentence exceeds its topological dimensions to become a microcosm of the entire work. We definitely hear Beckett in him."
"Review" by , "Like something far down the periodic table of elements, Krasznahorkai's sentences are strange, elusive, frighteningly radioactive. They seek to replicate the entropic whirl of consciousness itself and, in the case of Eszter, to stop its 'onward rush' entirely."
"Review" by , "On occasion, Krasznahorkai's sentences seem to swell and deflate; each clause seems to twist in its own direction. His sentences are, by turns, lovely, brutal, bombastic, ironic, and precise."
"Review" by , "Think of Satantango, then, as an Eastern European blues album that looks to affirm the coarse texture of life rather than auto-tune it into something smoother or more amendable to wish fulfillment."
"Review" by , "A writer without comparison, László Krasznahorkai plunges into the subconscious where this moral battle takes place, and projects it into a mythical, mysterious, and irresistible work of post-modern fiction, a novel certain to hold a high rank in the canon of Eastern European literature."
"Review" by , "Whether he's inside the minds and machinations of his characters' scheming heads, tramping through the muddy streets from one ruined destination to another, or speculating on the value of existence under such Godless conditions, Krasznahorkai proves himself to be capable of bringing anything to life, and Satantango's pages are teeming with it."
"Review" by , "László Krasznahorkai's novel Satantango is an argument for the vitality of translation. It is bold, dense, difficult, and utterly unforgettable."
"Synopsis" by , At long last, twenty-five years after the Hungarian genius László Krasznahorkai burst onto the scene with his first novel, Satantango dances into English in a beautiful translation by George Szirtes.
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