Awarding the Nobel prize for literature to Laszlo Krasznahorkai today, the Swedish Academy commended the author's 'compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art'. But in itself their decision is also a commitment to the value of serious and intellectual writing in an age characterised by immediacy, the distractions of digital culture and the entertainment industry. Krasznahorkai was first propelled into literary fame in Hungary, his home country, with his first novel Satantango (1985), a novel about a squalid, rain-soaked village visited by a mysterious man. He could be a prophet, Satan or merely a con man. The Melancholy of Resistance (2019) features a mysterious, charismatic figure, the Prince, who brings a rebellious carnival to a small community and tears it apart. Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming (2016) tells of an eccentric aristocrat returning to Hungary after exile in Argentina. Krasznahorkai's work began to be read more...
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