Satantango
by László Krasznahorkai(1985)
NovelHungarian
“One morning near the end of October not long before the first drops of the mercilessly long autumn rains began to fall on the cracked and worn-out belly of the plain.”
Satantango
László Krasznahorkai(1985)
Rain falls on a ruined Hungarian estate where a handful of people wait in mud and suspicion for something to change, and when a charismatic figure named Irimias returns from the dead, or from wherever the disappeared go, they follow him as though salvation could arrive in a leather coat. László Krasznahorkai published this novel in 1985, near the exhausted end of Soviet Hungary, and its sentences coil forward in unbroken paragraphs that deny the reader any resting place. The structure moves forward and then back, a tango of twelve chapters that retraces its own steps. Every hope is a trap. Every scheme collapses into the mud from which it rose. The prose itself becomes an instrument of entrapment, beautiful and merciless.
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