Do they miss the thing by waiting for it? And yet, everyone is waiting for something without knowing it, whether an end or a new beginning. Depravity abounds the young girls living there have taken to prostitution getting drunk and swindling one’s neighbors are the only ways to pass the time. It is set on a rundown estate near an abandoned mill, just after the end of communist rule. Fans of Krasznahorkai’s other books published in English - The Melancholy of Resistance (1989/2002) and War & War (1999/2006) - may have seen the impressive Hungarian auteur Béla Tarr’s seven-plus hour film adaptation from 1994, but for most this is a first encounter. The epigraph to Satantango - Krasznahorkai’s first novel, published in Hungarian in 1985, and this year by New Directions in an impeccable English translation by poet George Szirtes - is from Kafka’s The Castle: “In that case, I’ll miss the thing by waiting for it.” This sets the tone for the novel’s perverse, absurdist humanity and desolation. The gods will get the last dot.” As Satantango deals with people’s reactions to promises of hope and salvation, Krasznahorkai’s comments during the question-and-answer period underscore a major concerns in this novel: “I'm not interested to believe in something, but to understand the people who believe.”

The Hungarian writer read from Satantango and spoke about his elliptical and enigmatic prose style, offering the following anecdote when asked about his long-winded and often maddening sentences: “Everyone knows that the dot belongs not to human beings but the dot belongs to the gods. ON MONDAY, JULY 2, László Krasznahorkai read before a considerably rapt crowd at the Housing Works Bookstore in Manhattan.

Satantango by lászló krasznahorkai