He decided to watch everything every carefully and to record it constantly, all with the aim of not missing the smallest detail, because he realized with a shock that to ignore the apparently insignificant was to admit that one was condemned to sit defenseless on the parapet connecting the rising and falling members of the bridge between chaos and comprehensible order. In Tarr’s long, spare, black-and-white shots, the movement of Krasznahorkai’s sentences - if not their vitality or their rhythms - find an appropriate analogue: Satantango is perhaps best known as the seven-hour film of the same name by avant-garde filmmaker Béla Tarr, with whom Krasznahorkai often collaborates. It will be released this February by New Directions, the publisher responsible for the rest of Krasznahorkai’s English-language oeuvre: The Melancholy of Resistance was first published in 1998 (in Hungarian in 1989), followed by War & War in 2006 (in Hungarian in 1999), and AnimalInside, a slim pamphlet-sized book translated by Ottilie Mulzet with art from Max Neumann, in 2010. Satantango is the most recent of Krasznahorkai’s novels to appear in English, twenty-seven years after its publication in Hungary. 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. Amid such company, Krasznahorkai feels a bit like the uncle whose throat-clearing at holiday dinners causes those at the table to shift uneasily in their seats. Sebald, B ohumil Hrabal, and Witold Gombrowicz, to name a few. Post-war Europe has produced a cabal of writers responsible for similar feats of syntax: Thomas Bernhard, W.G.

George Szirtes, the award-winning British poet who has translated three of Krasznahorkai’s novels, describes the effect as a “slow lava flow of narrative, a vast black river of type.” But Krasznahorkai’s prose is not singular in this regard. They run on, at times, for pages, requiring diligence of even the patient reader.

Indeed, they are long: comma-spliced and unrelenting. If there is one element of László Krasznahorkai’s prose to which critics are most often drawn, it is the length of his sentences.

Satantango by László Krasznahorkai