The novels of Krasznahorkai, winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for literature, have a reputation for being formidable, perhaps because some of them sustain a single sentence across hundreds of pages, while others slowly develop an overarching theme with seemingly disparate vignettes. It’s true that they tend to demand a great deal from the reader, but once you’re in, it doesn’t feel like work. Reading his fiction is like riding a never-ending wave. All you have to do is pay attention and stay on the board.
Krasznahorkai himself has described his work in similar terms, specifically The World Goes On, a set of monologues and stories: “Each text is about drawing our attention away from this world, speeding our body toward annihilation, and immersing ourselves in a current of thought or narrative.”
It’s tempting to apply the above description to all of Krasznahorkai’s books, and to think of them as a retreat, but to do so would miss appreciating Krasznahorkai’s deep and impassioned engagement with the world. For instance, the more one worries about the rise of conspiracy theories, fascism, and groupthink, the more one will appreciate his most recent novel, Herscht 07769, about an intellectually disabled man forced into working for a neo-Nazi gang leader in their small German town, where nationalism is on the rise. You might even think of Krasznahorkai’s “away from this world” quote as wrapping around two sides of the same coin: our world, with all its distraction and insanity, requires from us a retreat of sustained attention to make any sense out of it.
It was Krasznahorkai’s earlier novels, The Melancholy of Resistance and Satantango, published in Hungary in the 1980s, that earned him his reputation on the world stage. Both remain incredibly powerful, but newcomers don’t need to start at the beginning to grasp his brilliance.
These five books below, including two big novels, two novellas, and a collection, were all published in the past decade, and they each offer an excellent entry point into the adventure that is reading Krasznahorkai.
Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming
In this novel, a mad genius decamps to his hometown in Hungary, on the run from gambling debts. There, as our review noted, he “determines to rid himself of ‘human imbecility.’” It's a quixotic pursuit, of course, the type of which appears often in Krasznahorkai’s work. We also compared the book to Dostoyevsky, claimed that it places the author “at the absolute summit of his decades-long project,” and chose it as a best book of 2019.
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Chasing Homer
This 2021 novella is also driven by a retreat, as the narrator flees a band of killers bent on annihilating him for unknown reasons. He seeks refuge on a Croatian island, said to be the place where Odysseus was held captive by the nymph Calypso. Our review said this one “reads like a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie dreamed up by Beckett and Kafka.”
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Herscht 07769
I don’t recommend having a fever, but I happened to be laid up with one when I devoured this 512-page novel, and it felt like the perfect state to be in for the story of Florian Herscht and his mission to warn German chancellor Angela Merkel of an oncoming apocalypse. Even more arresting than Florian’s bizarre and misguided conviction of the world's end is Krasznahorkai’s description of Florian’s backwater town, where rising nationalist sentiments offer cover for a band of neo-Nazis: “Almost everyone here is a Nazi, even the ones who don’t realize it yet,” says one character, a lonely antifascist. We named the novel among the top 10 books of 2024.
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Spadework for a Palace
Fans of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and especially Enrique Vila-Matas’s novel Bartleby & Co. will love Krasznahorkai’s 2022 novella about a New York City librarian. The librarian, whose name is herman melvill, is obsessed with Melville (our review points out that herman's choice of lowercase style for his name signifies "his lowly self-regard compared to the classic author"). Amusingly, herman stakes a position similar to that of Bartleby, who is known for saying he “would prefer not to,” by refusing to lend out books.
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The World Goes On
In our review of this collection, we claimed that it “breaks all conventions and tests the very limits of language, resulting in a transcendent, astounding experience.” The review ran before my time as fiction reviews editor at PW, but I remember reading that line and thinking that it matched up with how I felt after diving headlong into this book back when it was published in 2017. If you enjoy surprises and like not knowing what a book is or where it's taking you, this one’s for you.
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