Awards
Staff Pick
The Hungarian master's purported grand finale is a cacophonous comedy of manners and machinations populated by a motley crew of cynics, swindlers, extremists, and dupes. Appropriately apocalyptic, polyphonic, and serpentine, Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming delivers a virtuosic performance without sentiment or ceremony. A chaotic choral arrangement for the end of the world. Recommended By Justin W., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Set in contemporary times, Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming tells the story of a Prince Myshkin–like figure, Baron Béla Wenckheim, who returns at the end of his life to his provincial Hungarian hometown. Having escaped from his many casino debts in Buenos Aires, where he was living in exile, he longs to be reunited with his high-school sweetheart Marika. Confusions abound, and what follows is an endless storm of gossip, con men, and local politicians, vividly evoking the small town’s alternately drab and absurd existence. All along, the Professor — a world-famous natural scientist who studies mosses and inhabits a bizarre Zen-like shack in a desolate area outside of town — offers long rants and disquisitions on his attempts to immunize himself from thought. Spectacular actions are staged as death and the abyss loom over the unsuspecting townfolk.
Review
"László Krasznahorkai’s masterpiece — a manic Greek chorus that infuses festive Technicolor into his multifaceted, bleak vision. Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming calls into question our acceptance of the crippling status quo, delivering universal truths in a way that few books can anymore. It is precisely the novel we need in these difficult, foreboding times. His funniest and most profound book and, quite possibly, also his most accessible." The Millions
Review
"I’ve said a thousand times that I always wanted to write just one book. Now, with Baron, I can close this story. With this novel I can prove that I really wrote just one book in my life. This is the book — Satantango, Melancholy, War and War, and Baron. This is my one book." László Krasznahorkai (The Paris Review Interview)
Review
"Krasznahorkai constantly pushes beyond the expected, escalating everything to the brink of deliriousness." Idra Novey, The New York Times Book Review
Review
"A master of peripatetic, never-ending sentences that brim over with vacillations, qualifications, and false epiphanies." Will Harrison, Hudson Review
About the Author
László Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, Hungary, in 1954. He worked for some years as an editor until 1984, when he became a freelance writer. He now lives in reclusiveness in the hills of Szentlászló. He has written five novels and won numerous prizes, including the 2015 Man Booker International Prize, and the 2013 Best Translated Book Award in Fiction for Satantango. In 1993, he won the Best Book of the Year Award in Germany for The Melancholy of Resistance. For more about Krasznahorkai, visit his extensive website.
Ottilie Mulzet is a Hungarian translator of poetry and prose, as well as a literary critic. She has worked as the English-language editor of the Internet journal of the Hungarian Cultural Centre in Prague, and her translations appear regularly at Hungarian Literature Online.