Satantango

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."

"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

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

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

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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

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

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.

The story ofSatantango, 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. "

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.