László Krasznahorkai

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!… (mere)

"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.… (mere)