"For many ordinary readers, the idea of entering a fictional world constantly teetering on the edge of a revelation that is always imminent but concealed, in which words pace ceaselessly around reference, and whose favored tool is the long, unstopped sentence, one that takes, say, four hundred pages to unfurl, might constitute-well, it might constitute precisely the kind of teetering insanity that Krasznahorkai has written so brilliantly and sympathetically about, for so many years."
"Back then, only two of Krasznahorkai's novels were available in English-"The Melancholy of Resistance" and " War and War," which had been published in Hungarian in 1989 and 1999, respectively. Krasznahorkai was already a European phenomenon, especially in Germany, where he was living and where most of his work had been translated. There it was common to hear him described as a likely future Nobel laureate, but, with so little to go on in English, such rumors had the status of palace gossip."
Krasznahorkai's fiction constructs worlds that seem to promise imminent revelations yet deliver none, with prose that endlessly circles reference. The favored technique is the long, unstopped sentence, sometimes extending across hundreds of pages, producing a sustained sense of teetering and madness. By 2011 only two novels were available in English, originally published in Hungarian in 1989 and 1999, while most translations and wider recognition existed in Germany. Reputation there transformed into talk of possible Nobel distinction despite limited English access. One early novel inspired Béla Tarr's seven-hour film adaptation despite lacking an English translation.
Read at The New Yorker
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