The Long Breath of the World

On László Krasznahorkai’s sentences and what they require of us.

By Nyuol Lueth TongJanuary 14, 2026

• Literary Criticism

• Fiction

THERE IS A CRITICAL tendency to call László Krasznahorkai “difficult,” a term of convenience that allows the impatient and the devout to shelter under the same uneasy banner, albeit for opposite reasons. The impatient deploy it as a complaint—an exasperated shorthand for a writer who, in their view, refuses to hurry, who exacts from them an allegedly outdated form of attention. The devout, meanwhile, offer it as a kind of bow—an honorific that sanctifies the time his novels require. Both camps confuse effort with punishment. What gets labeled “difficulty” in his work isn’t an assault on comprehension but the restoration of an almost forgotten virtue—the older discipline by which reading proceeds at the tempo of consciousness, which is to say it is errant, recursive, even slow, yet ever alert to the eddies of thought that gradually become understanding.

The 2025 Nobel laureate’s sentences—long, tensile, torrential, apparently inexhaustible—do not obscure meaning so much as chart its turbulence. Their complexity is not aesthetic bravura but ethical posture. Krasznahorkai writes as if any frictionless phrasing, any prematurely polished summation, would constitute a form of moral impatience, as if compression were a capitulation. In this he is closer to Proust than to Joyce: distrustful of summary, skeptical of the crystalline aperçu, committed to tracking the mind’s encounter with the world at something like life-size, and unwilling to feign tidiness where none exists. His novels are not dense; they are vast. They sprawl not from unwieldiness but from insistence. Length is structural, not ornamental, recurrence counterpoint rather than tic. One senses, reading his novels, that he refuses to abbreviate existence out of regard, as though the very act of compression risked falsifying what the gaze has patiently taken in.

In a Yale Review interview published early last year, Hari Kunzru recalled Krasznahorkai’s mischievous claim that the full stop “belongs to God,” a remark that can sound like a throwaway bit of literary theology until one recognizes the seriousness tucked inside it: the recognition that experience—especially experience distilled from courage, sorrow, or prolonged witness—does not arrive in neat verbal parcels. The flow of his syntax, Kunzru argues, conveys a “profound humanism,” though not the jagged interiority of canonical stream of consciousness. It is, rather than introspection, a widening orbit around perception—curiosity unbound.

Our misunderstanding of him, such as it is, reflects a broader anxiety that treats reading as an athletic contest of instant comprehension. We prize the quick “take”—we want to “get it”—and turn aggrieved when a text refuses to conform. Krasznahorkai, with the amused obstinacy that marks his best work, doesn’t write against this clock so much as beneath its notice. His art replaces velocity with attention. One follows his sentences as one watches weather: fronts forming at the horizon, pressure accumulating by degrees, fluctuations that announce, in aggregate, the approach of something unavoidable.

In a White Review interview, Krasznahorkai reflected that a continuous sentence permits what we might call—lacking a better term—the exactness of hesitation. The remark sounds paradoxical, yet it turns out to be true. The unbroken sentence becomes a grammar of scruple. It traces the mental footwork by which assertion shades into doubt and returns as a more provisional assertion, giving the reader not only room to inhabit thought but also time to recognize what thinking actually feels like. These sentences do not aspire to opacity; they aspire to accuracy. These are sentences that reject the consolation of manageability, that press against the reader’s instinct for reduction and instead ask for narrative stamina—an openness to experience rendered at its actual scale.

This fidelity—call it an ethics of attention—shapes the four major novels that form the backbone of his oeuvre: Satantango (1985; trans. George Szirtes, 2012), The Melancholy of Resistance (1989; trans. Szirtes, 1998), War & War (1999; trans. Szirtes, 2006), and Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming (2016; trans. Ottilie Mulzet, 2019). At first glance, they resemble familiar apocalypse narratives, the end-time parables we know how to categorize. Yet apocalypse, in Krasznahorkai’s unhurried hands, is not an event but an atmosphere—the condition that arises when rituals persist after belief has drained away. His novels concern, rather than catastrophe, perseverance: the strange, human insistence on continuing even when the rationale for doing so has thinned to a filament. And it is his exquisitely paced prose—its humanism, its scruple, its patient circling of the possible—that gives these works their gravity. What remains, finally, is what happens when meaning steps back, leaving the mind to navigate the half-light in which it must discover its own bearings.

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Satantango begins in a deluge: rain that has been falling forever and will go on falling, as though the sky were fulfilling a contractual obligation to remind the villagers that the world’s original condition was not Eden but mud. The deserted collective farm on which the novel unfolds is less a place than a damp human contrivance—an improvised settlement of warped beams and buckling plaster, where the broken state lingers like an old debt and the petty corruptions that thrive in low light function as a kind of communal metabolism. The villagers trudge between house and pub, between one stale scheme and the next; their itineraries obey the circular logic of rituals whose meanings have long evaporated while their motions persist. Out of this mud rises a rumor, then a man: Irimiás, who may be a savior, a charlatan, or simply another emanation of the weather. The villagers, sodden and credulous, pin to him a need for deliverance older than their circumstances, a need that predates the collective, the village, perhaps even the Hungarian plain. What they receive instead is movement: a choreography of hope, panic, resignation, and delusion, punctuated by yet more rain.

The temptation for many novelists in such a landscape is to be brisk: sketch the bleakness, establish the grotesques, dispense a revelation or two, then hustle the reader toward an interpretation that satisfies the plot while cheapening the atmosphere. Krasznahorkai refuses this convenience and thereby locates the book’s moral center. He declines to wheel meaning into the town square like a portable shrine. He gives neither the characters nor the reader the solace of clarity. Instead, he offers duration, a style in which the sentence keeps moving even when the characters stall; syntax that persists long after intention has drained away. It is not that nothing happens—a child dies, a town conspires, a pretender sermonizes with borrowed authority—but that the novel insists that the experience of happening must be measured in human increments of time. Irimiás—the emblematic figure—sets off. But it is not so much a setting-off as a kind of moving again, because to set off would suggest the existence of a place to set off to, because “the darkness” hovers, “still in flight at the edge of things, somewhere on the far side on the western horizon, where its countless terrors vanish one by one like a desperate, confused, defeated army.” The pathos is gentle; the precision, ruthless. The words walk as the people walk, in the weary cadence of a life that has forgotten where it learned to limp.

This weariness is as vigilant as it is vivid—a dogged attentiveness the novel treats as a survival skill. One character, straining to keep his grip on the dissolving edges of the world, knows that “however apparently insignificant the event, whether it be the ring of tobacco ash surrounding the table, the direction from which the wild geese first appeared, or a series of seemingly meaningless human movements, he couldn’t afford to take his eyes off it and must note it all down, since only by doing so could he hope not to vanish one day.” What the novel calls “the infernal arrangement whereby the world decomposes but is at the same time constantly in the process of self-construction” becomes the enabling condition of Krasznahorkai’s method: perception as a defense against erasure, syntax as a fragile rampart against dissolution. He is not chronicling a world that is merely bleak; he is chronicling a world that must be continually re-perceived in order not to disappear.

The book’s realism lies in this refusal to privilege moments by narrative fiat. It grants as much attention to a plate of cold meat as to the first stirrings of rumor; a face is held with the same patient scrutiny whether it is drunk and babbling or sober and negotiating desire; the imagination is permitted to rehearse its exhausted fantasies until the rehearsal acquires the dignity of an event. Time in Satantango does not pass; it thickens. Krasznahorkai’s prose does not broaden space so much as bore into it, dwelling within weak currents until they develop their own gravity. The sentences move centrifugally, patiently circling a doorway or a puddle or a room until its perimeter softens, as if attention itself had dislodged the scene and prompted it to confess some latent contour.

This dilation is a kind of ontological inquiry. In one moment of near-cosmic articulation, the narrator describes Irimiás scraping “the mud off his lead-heavy shoes” while dawn breaks “swift as memory,” the sun arriving “like a beggar daily panting up to his spot on the temple steps, […] ready to establish the world of shadows, to separate the trees one from the other, to raise, out of the freezing, confusing homogeneity of night […] a clearly defined earth and sky with distinct animals and men.” The passage literalizes the novel’s central conviction: that perception—slow, stubborn, imperfect—is the only creation story available. The world must be reraised each morning not out of divine mandate but because consciousness demands it, and Krasznahorkai documents the daily labor of making the world legible.

So, when the book lingers inside an October night “beating with a single pulse,” alive with horseflies, rain, acacia scritches, and “the strange nightshift work of the bugs in the table legs,” it is not indulging in textual luxuriance. It is demonstrating how experience parcels itself into units of endurance—how “the narrow space into which a word, a sentence or a movement might perfectly fit” becomes the only workable measure of survival. Here, rhythm overtakes plot: “[B]ehind things other things appear as if by mischief, and once beyond the power of the eye they no longer hang together.” That fracture is the novel’s moral weather—the condition under which human attempts to understand or persist must operate. If the world refuses coherence, the sentence must provide it, however provisionally.

Much has been made of political background: a writer shaped by a state that perfected the art of oppressive stagnation, whose citizens became experts in the bureaucratic choreography of tedium. And there is often a reflex, among Western readers, to treat East-Central European sentences as encrypted statecraft—as if syntax were a code for censorship or resistance. The truth is both narrower and more expansive. Bureaucracy is itself a grammar: it creates subordinates without a governing verb; it proliferates clauses that dangle. But Krasznahorkai’s sentence is not merely a resistance to political abbreviation. It registers a broader metaphysical scruple: that thought—about anything that matters—rarely arrives without detour. The state in Satantango is simply more weather, more drizzle. The book’s true subject is the unglamorous persistence required to survive either one.

Yet even at its bleakest, Krasznahorkai refuses to convert experience into revelation. The girl who learns at her father’s funeral that death “was something that could be chosen,” and that “rat poison would do the trick too,” represents neither allegory nor case study. She is simply another inhabitant of the novel’s exhausting weather, another participant in the long moral experiment of duration. Her tragedy does not elevate the book into meaning; it extends its atmosphere of metaphysical confusion—the sense that despair can masquerade as instruction, that knowledge can arrive in the wrong idiom, at the wrong moment, with the wrong consequences.

The moral pressure of Krasznahorkai’s style becomes clearest at the point of exhaustion. By the novel’s final pages, the reader’s fatigue mirrors that of the villagers: both have survived the deluge by enduring it, step by step, clause by clause. What remains is not catharsis but a chastened vigilance—a recognition that attention, sustained long enough, can become a form of grace. “Patience,” Simone Weil wrote, “is strength itself.” Satantango treats endurance as necessity, the unadorned persistence of refusing to succumb—to weather, to decay, to bewilderment, or to the suspicion that nothing will change and that this, too, must be attended to.

Perhaps this is why, near the end, when the villagers approach the bar and find it seemingly deserted—“not a soul … but now, someone is playing the harmonica”—the moment registers neither as reprieve nor as threat but as another beat in the book’s stubborn pulse. Irimiás again “scrapes the mud off his lead-heavy shoes […] and the rain begins again.” This recurrence is the novel’s deepest realism: the long sentence does not promise meaning; it promises motion—which, in Satantango, is the closest the villagers (or we, for that matter) come to hope.

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The Melancholy of Resistance widens the aperture from farm to town, shifting its attention from weather to spectacle, as if the novel were climbing one more rung on the evolutionary ladder of catastrophe. What arrives is a rumor equipped with props—a traveling circus, though “circus” is merely the villagers’ first provisional name for this itinerant apparatus of dread. It carries, among other curiosities, a dead whale, a silent prince, and that nebulous charge that clings to any enterprise of dubious origin and unexamined motive.

It is entirely in keeping with Krasznahorkai’s moral geometry that this spectacle announces itself through the same misapprehension that governs Mrs. Plauf’s disastrous train encounter, where a trivial mishap mutates with ghastly speed into “some infernal snare,” and every attempt at clarification is misread until she grasps “the monstrous misunderstanding of which she had become the victim.” Mrs. Plauf is the anxious, elderly petit bourgeois woman whose perspective frames the novel’s opening and closing movements, and the mother of Valuska, the “village idiot” she has all but disowned; she incarnates a fearful, self-protective respectability. The town’s delicate arrangements—its provisional officials, out-of-tune choirs, bureaucratic habits, and domesticated despairs—become an unwitting instrument on which rumor rehearses its scales, mastering first the bright notes of credulity and then the darker ones of fear. The whale is merely the outward emblem of what Mrs. Plauf discovers in the urine-smelling booth: that “after so much gossip, so much terrifying rumour-mongering,” a community may feel “it was all “going down the drain,” and that “in ‘a world where such things happen’ the collapse into anarchy would inevitably follow.”

Krasznahorkai is a meticulous anatomist when and where language buckles under the conditions of trepidation and fear. Rumor multiplies pronouns the way panic multiplies shadows, blame recruits the passive voice as its confederate, certainty hardens into slogan, and moral responsibility evaporates in the tepid vapor of generality. The long paragraph narrating Mrs. Plauf’s terror—her misread gestures, the man’s petty degradations, the suffocating booth in which she “felt a miserable victim […] of the entire hostile universe, against whose absolute chill […] there is no valid defence”—shows how syntax, once touched by catastrophe, becomes a conduit for it. The sentence lengthens not to display amplitude but to register incursion: clause annexing clause, conjunction chasing conjunction, a grammar staggering forward as if, as one character mordantly puts it, “half a day” is all “we can keep going on two legs.” In Melancholy, the town’s political and moral uprightness proves equally rickety; language, like anatomy, is forever on the verge of pitching forward under the weight of its own inferences. It often reads like a farce staged beside an open grave: a performance in which participants declaim, vend, and rehearse their civic hymns, unaware that collective panic has already begun to imprint itself, almost autonomously, upon the rhythm of their days.

The novel avoids the flattening force of allegory by turning to humor. Not the disinfecting levity of irony, which would cheapen the stakes, but a stoical, slow-igniting comedy that shares a street with grief. A rhapsodically earnest musicologist lecturing over the faint roar of disorder, a choir rehearsing civic hymns as the town decays around them, a petty functionary intoxicated by procedure—these jokes serve as instruments of discernment, exposing the precise hinge at which societal order tips into absurdity. Even Eszter’s metaphysical reveries participate in this somber comedy. When he reflects that faith “is not a matter of believing something, but believing that somehow things could be different,” only to concede that music “was a cure that did not work, a barbiturate that functioned as an opiate,” he points to the central contradiction animating the town: its longing for conviction is indistinguishable from its aptitude for delusion. Krasznahorkai laughs at the collapse without laughing at the collapsed, reserving his harshness for the forces—political, metaphysical, linguistic—that flatten people, and his tenderness for those left flattened. This tone of thin, humane laughter is what keeps the world steady in the reader’s hands even as it burns.

If Satantango evinces the vicissitudes of a community stalled in the rain, The Melancholy of Resistance examines the syntax of a society in which spectacle has supplanted conviction. It is not the whale or the prince that matters; it is the town’s voracious hunger for someone—anyone—to speak with authority, the same hunger that allows Mrs. Plauf’s fleeting misinterpretation to metastasize into persecution, or that leads Eszter to confront “a shadow in the mirror, a mirror where the image and the mirror wholly coincided though the shadow nevertheless tried to separate them,” an emblem as precise as any for a society attempting—too late—to distinguish illusion from truth after the two have fused. Krasznahorkai stages the stage managers and lets them issue directives until their authority becomes absurd, a mechanism suddenly exposed to daylight. And yet, amid the wreckage, he grants his characters brief lucidities: the moment when Eszter, “having recovered from the extraordinary effort of recognizing” his own misguided ascent toward resignation, feels inexplicably “glad simply to be alive” and sees the world recover its “original significance”—the fire a fire again, the window a window. These passing clarities are not resolutions; they are stays against annihilation, small pieces of proof that the mind can still—if only for a breath—refuse its own unraveling.

If the novel had a motto, it might be the musicologist’s weary insight that people will choose a broken system—however malfunctioning, however cruel—over the silence that requires invention. “Do they think it’s good like this?” one character asks of those genuflecting before the idea of human progress. “I find nothing amusing in it.” The demagogue punctuates; the democrat qualifies. Grammar and politics, the novel suggests, are kin: both reveal their truest commitments in how they handle ambiguity. Krasznahorkai’s long sentence becomes a modest democracy of hesitation, recognizing, more accurately than any slogan, how swiftly the mind seeks the consolations of spectacle, even as it marks, in its rare moments of release, how briefly a person might glimpse the possibility that things—syntax, society, the self—could be otherwise.

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War & War opens with a sentence so taut and exhausted that the reader must blink, then recalibrate: “Heaven is sad.” The sadness is structural, almost architectural. It is the by-product of an order that can no longer guarantee coherence and thus exposes its inhabitants, human or otherwise, to “that which is treacherous and irresistible.” The novel begins as if the metaphysical sky had been drained of its last dependable color, leaving a pallid vault under which walks György Korin, the clerk-prophet of Krasznahorkai’s darker evangel. He advances with the feverish gait of a man who has found a manuscript that he considers himself morally, even cosmically, bound to preserve.

The premise, summarized, invites allegory, just as The Melancholy of Resistance seems to solicit mythic inflation against its will. But Krasznahorkai distrusts the seductions of symbol. He wards them off by giving us the man—sweaty, underfed, singed by obsession—and then giving us more sentences, which undo him slowly, clause by clause. Korin’s task is monastic: to rescue coherence molecule by molecule, to spare one fragile sequence of language from extinction. He will carry the manuscript to New York and upload it to the internet and “fix it in its eternal reality,” so that it may float forever, even as he suspects that “forever” is merely a euphemism for unattended drift, an afterlife without witnesses; and even though, in an era in which “all is false by now, […] one lie after another,” the very gesture of preservation is contaminated by the language that must perform it.

The book is a portrait of monomania rendered as a species of devotion. Korin belongs to a brotherhood of language ascetics: Kafka’s hunger artist; Beckett’s Unnamable; Melville’s Bartleby, who declines not only preference but also the cultural machinery that makes preference intelligible. Like them, Korin behaves as though language were both prison and chapel, both the binding and the possibility of release. This duality crystallizes when he is seized by the revelation that he has “understood nothing, nothing at all about anything,” and that the puzzle of the world and the puzzle of himself are “one and the same thing.” He has no doctrine to deliver, no sermon, only a task that supplants doctrine. The manuscript he carries, populated by wanderers fated to approach a vanishing point, becomes a gravitational distortion: it bends his errands, insomnia, urban detritus, even the last scraps of reason, into its orbit. The price of such devotion is a cultivated blindness, a life so attuned to the manuscript’s fragile demands that the world’s victories and jubilations strike him with what the novel calls an “icy-cold feeling of repulsion.” He possesses an “inborn antipathy to life’s winners,” by which the book means that his allegiance lies instinctively with the defeated, whose suffering—private, unadorned, random—he recognizes as the only honest index of experience.

To everyone he meets, Korin’s efforts seem absurd; to Korin, they are merely necessary, the way breathing is necessary even when one does not understand the mechanism. It must be put there, he insists—into the ether, into the only space that might hold it—because otherwise it will be nowhere. The resolve is a bleak prayer, and it encodes a theory of art that cannot afford theory. Korin believes that “the place where he might have deposited his personal memory was lost,” and that only the manuscript—its fragile order, its desperate symmetry—remains as a possible repository for coherence, a place where what once resembled meaning might be stored against the world’s corrosion. Yet he senses, accurately if dimly, “that that which is too big for us is altogether too big.” His devotion is therefore both metaphysical and pathetic: a commitment to a task that cannot redeem him and may hasten his disappearance, as though the preservation of one text necessarily entailed the deletion of its guardian.

The novel’s deepest pulse lies in syntax. The real journey unfolds within the sentences, those narrow battlegrounds where coherence and disintegration wrestle clause by clause, sometimes word by word. Krasznahorkai does not merely describe Korin’s mania; he composes in its temperature. We hear the stammer of reason pushing toward the next subordinate clause; we feel the sentence’s hunger to continue, not because a conclusion is approaching but because any available conclusion would be a lie—or worse, a cliché. This momentum becomes the grammatical analogue of Korin’s conviction that “what one ought to capture in beauty is that which is treacherous and irresistible,” and of his dismay at a world that embraced “what was transcendent” in order “to empty [such things] of their content.” When Korin, half-delirious in a New York hotel room, describes his project—paraphrasing—as an infinite wound of meaning, we believe him. Meaning, here, is not essence but laceration: the cut by which the world is briefly, painfully, laid bare.

One of the novel’s quietest and most moving feats is its treatment of the upload—the sacrament in Korin’s cosmology—not as a gadget but as a liturgy. Korin watches the words become code, then light, then something like spirit; he imagines them “ascending.” What we see is bureaucracy: progress bars, long minutes, fluorescent rooms that flatten even the sublime into gray scale. When it reaches a hundred percent, he tells a bored stranger, “it will be there.” Yet “there” proves the wrong eternity: not permanence but the eerie futurity in which “it had become absolutely impossible to speak of loss because the very act of speaking had become impossible.” The sentence holds its breath during the upload’s slow crawl; the moment the bar fills, something in Korin empties. The text persists, yes, but in the peculiar eternity of the unread—a digital afterlife that fulfills his hope while nullifying its purpose. It inhabits the future he dreads, a future in which “everything you said […] turned into a lie the instant you pronounced it.” Having completed the task, Korin begins to leak out of himself. Preservation, delivered to the wrong recipient—the void—becomes a theology of deletion, confirming his suspicion that the world continues mechanically without us, and yet “there is no mechanism,” no providential machine to catch what falls.

If Satantango is a study of communal endurance and The Melancholy of Resistance a portrait of social delirium, War & War turns the problem inward: what happens to a mind when survival becomes indistinguishable from truth, indistinguishable from salvation? Korin is not punished for this confusion; he is merely revealed. The tragedy is not that he fails to save the manuscript but that he succeeds. The novel’s tragicomic shimmer arises from the tension between his apocalyptic courtesy—his habit of explaining to strangers, almost tenderly, his nearly impossible task—and the world’s tolerant incomprehension, its polite refusal to dignify his revelation. In that dyad, Krasznahorkai captures the modern writer’s predicament: to believe, without evidence and against the habits of the age, that a sentence may still be read; to persist even when “the field of stars and the forest of signals” regard us without relation; to speak into an ether indifferent to speech, blind in both darkness and radiance. Korin insists, with the severity of the obsessed, on the minimal truth that order is a form of love, and that “to love order is to love life”—a faith whose cost he pays in full, sentence by magnificent sentence.

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The last of the quartet, Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming, reverses course with what feels less like an argument than a shrug. If War & War ended by sending its manuscript aloft—vertigo as transmission, a text escaping the life that bruised it—Baron Wenckheim begins in recoil: not a flight toward eternity, nor even toward a modest secular rescue, but a rueful, almost penitential return. Here Krasznahorkai gives a character one of his frankest formulations—“It’s not that I don’t understand why a person has to die, but rather, I don’t understand why a person has to live”—and the plot unfolds as a slow gloss on that bewilderment, an extended footnote to an ontological wince. Baron Béla Wenckheim—gambler, prodigal, sometime émigré (his decades in Argentina survive as embroidered rumor, half fact and half moral verdict)—comes back to a provincial Hungarian town that has readied for him a full municipal opera of welcome. Committees rehearse their speeches with a fretful earnestness that betrays how little they have to say; choirs practice hallelujahs meant to summon a mood they no longer quite recall; the mayor works on composure as though it were a diplomatic brief; and gossip, sensing a fresh host, fattens by the hour.

The Baron who arrives—diminished, bewildered, trailed by nostalgia, debt, and the faint aroma of regret—is mistaken for a redeemer, and is too polite or too tired, or perhaps too aware of the civic machinery already humming, to correct anyone. In their delirium of anticipation, the locals echo the townswoman who declares that “great things were happening here […] because the news is going round that the Baron […] is supposedly coming home.” The comedy lies in the slow, blinking recognition of error, a collective ceremony discovering, one sputtering speech at a time, that its messiah has returned bearing nothing but his age, and that age will not convert into symbol.

Krasznahorkai uses comedy as an instrument of tenderness rather than derision; he avoids the easy harvest of absurdity, those coarse hierarchies by which satire usually allots significance. The corrupt mayor, the prim choirmaster, the strutting broadcaster—local potentates who would read as caricatures in a lesser novel—are not exposed so much as revealed, their gestures obsolete rather than wicked, ridiculous only in the way habits become ridiculous once severed from the conditions that once gave them meaning. They are what persists when a language of purpose has died but the mouth, unaware of the death, keeps speaking. It is the same logic behind the narrator’s own savage aperçu that “to be Hungarian is not to belong to a people, but instead it’s an illness, […] a misfortune of epidemic proportions.” The provocation reads less as nationalism turned inward than as ethnographic metaphysics: a diagnosis of habit’s survival long after its cause has bled away. The novel’s social vision is indeed a grotesque miniature of postcommunist fatigue, yet it is also a pastoral of stubborn continuance, where the apocalypse, if it comes, arrives not with trumpet blasts but in the key of paperwork. This is a world in which a population has learned, almost professionally, how to endure itself.

Running parallel to the town’s pageant is another thread: a man in the forest known only as “the Professor,” who has renounced thought the way others renounce drink or cards. If Korin in War & War is the martyr of expression—driven to preserve every molecule of coherence—then the Professor is expression’s hermit, its apostate. He calls thought “an incurable disease, from which […] we will never be able to free ourselves,” treating his withdrawal as cure, as if cognition itself were a toxin seeping through the species. The novel understands his renunciation as a war against distortion; as one passage insists, “it’s precisely the infinite that casts light upon how the brain thinks, […] those methods of distortion, that dislocation.” The Professor believes he can escape dislocation by refusing cognition altogether, extinguishing the very instrument through which the town continues to inflate its fantasies.

The text partly corroborates his suspicion, reminding us that “every human culture is created by fear,” and that fear “defines human existence […] because nothing else bears within it such dreadful strength.” Though the Professor never meets the Baron, their stories reverberate through the novel. Together they form a dialectic of exhaustion: public spectacle answered by private renunciation. One keeps speaking long past the point of meaning; the other seeks meaning by refusing speech altogether. Krasznahorkai commits to neither remedy. Instead, he listens—an aesthetic and ethical stance—reminding us, through one of the book’s pointed admonitions, that “we must never lose sight of that gaze with which we look at things,” as though attention were the last uncollapsed value.

By the time the novel reaches its culminating vista, satire has thinned into elegy. Fires are set, decrees issued, chaos spreads—not with atrocity’s theatricality but with something more banal, more recognizably contemporary: administrative panic. The world begins to resemble that terrible tableau in which “only the wind roared across the city, […] every door in every house, every window in every wall, every lamp on the streets along the way trembled,” all except the monstrous tankers that stood “aimlessly, stupidly, […] like some horrific mistake,” immovable witnesses to a human order undone by its own illusions. This is the landscape in which Krasznahorkai stages his final argument: that fear, misperception, rumor, and the sheer drag of history make communities quake far more readily than the supposedly durable structures looming over them.

The book ends on a human syllable that has learned how to stop:

And at the end he looked up to the sky, the darkening sky, raising both his hands, and as he had clearly seen someone, maybe a conductor, do before, he motioned to the invisible audience, at the same time cheerfully calling out the encouraging summons:

And now everybody—

The sentence that once sought infinity—those litanies and accumulations—now turns inward; its cadence accepts that to end is also a form of knowledge, perhaps the only one left. And out of the smoke and bureaucratic wind, Krasznahorkai retrieves a slim doctrine of attention. A child moves a snail out of harm’s way. The prose holds the gesture with the same unflinching concentration it grants the town’s collapse. Something like justice is attempted. If meaning persists, it does so not in grand redemptions but in the small, nearly invisible act of looking, of refusing to avert one’s gaze. It is a gesture against spectacle and nihilism both, a final affirmation that our fearful, unsteady seeing is the only homecoming we are offered.

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In a New Yorker essay from June 2011, James Wood likened the sensation of reading Krasznahorkai to “seeing a group of people standing in a circle in a town square, apparently warming their hands at a fire, only to discover, as one gets closer, that there is no fire, and that they are gathered around nothing at all.” The metaphor is both comic and exacting, capturing that atmosphere of imminence—the sense, familiar to his readers, of revelation poised just beyond articulation—that permeates his fiction. For many, Wood admits in a more recent essay, stepping into “a fictional world constantly teetering on the edge of a revelation that is always imminent but concealed,” a world in which language “pace[s] ceaselessly around reference,” can feel like an invitation to madness: reality inspected until it shimmers, the ordinary subjected to such relentless scrutiny that it begins to buckle. Yet that teetering—those slow, circling approaches toward meaning, never quite closing the distance—is part of the fidelity his prose demands. For Krasznahorkai, meaning isn’t seized; it is shadowed. It remains alluring precisely because it resists the definitive gesture; to fix it would be to betray it.

Indeed, one can feel a philosophy of the sentence running across Satantango, The Melancholy of Resistance, War & War, and Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming like wood grain: a belief that style is not manner but conscience. What the four books bring into view is, furthermore, less a stylistic signature than a form of tutelage: a lesson in how attention might be retrained when the usual shortcuts collapse. Krasznahorkai’s long sentence—so often misread as gauntlet or provocation—functions instead as a counter-climate, a zone of altered pressure in which the mind is obliged to move before it knows where it is going, to follow the clause as it fulfills its lingering obligations to the world. There is an austere theology here. The world, if it is to be understood, must first be endured.

If this sounds severe, the severity lies in us—in our impatience, our appetite for distillate, our conflation of clarity with truth. Krasznahorkai does not deny clarity; he insists that it be earned. He teaches a discipline of comprehension that resembles accompaniment more than conquest. One reads alongside the prose, keeping the pace of the writer and his constructed worlds. The reward is not the tidy satisfaction of “I got it,” but a more delicate knowledge: the sensation of having stayed with a mind thinking at full stretch. The fatigue induced is not punitive; it is egalitarian. Writer and reader labor together. Breath becomes a commons.

“Difficulty,” then, is in Krasznahorkai’s prose a kind of hospitality, an invitation to inhabit a weather system that withholds the consolations of quick clarity in order to deepen clarity’s eventual reach. Live in this atmosphere long enough and the body adjusts: the eye recalibrates, the ear relearns its priorities, and thought remembers its own patient mechanisms—its joints, its hesitations, its slow expansions. What remains after the book is shut is neither enlightenment nor interpretive triumph but something quieter and sturdier. A discipline of attention that lingers like weather on the skin long after one has stepped indoors. A cadence the lungs begin to memorize. A way of keeping breath when the air itself has tired.

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Featured image: Lenke Szilágyi, Krasznahorkai László, is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. Image has been cropped.