The Brooklyn Rail

In a 2018 Paris Review interview, rangy yet thoughtful, the Hungarian genius László Krasznahorkai announced he was through. That year he’d turned sixty four, and he’d brought off perhaps a dozen novels (the count is complicated by his idiosyncrasy), none of them brief, plus as many texts in other genres, including brilliant shorter fictions like “The Last Wolf” (2009). Granted, no later title may have generated the excitement of his 1985 debut, Satantango, internationally acclaimed and, ten years later, reconfigured into one of the most challenging movies ever, a seven-hour adaptation by Béla Tarr⎯ but the subsequent work never lacked for praise and awards. Susan Sontag hailed Krasznahorkai as a “master of the apocalypse,” W. G. Sebald was also a fan, and before long the author was appearing on shortlists for the Nobel. Still and all, following the 2016 publication of his doorstopper Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming (published in English in 2019), the Hungarian declared his task was done.

“I can close this story,” he told the interviewer; “I really wrote just one book in my life.” A set of four, that is, beginning with Satantango and ending with Baron. The quartet shares the same principal setting, a downtrodden Hungarian burg bewildered by the collapse of the Soviet bloc, and together they enact La Comédie humaine, in which timeless evils, greed especially, suffer latter-day chills, like the shadows of the Holocaust or the collapse of an entire way of life. Then too, all four texts unfold in sentences that tumble on endlessly yet exquisitely, suggesting nothing so much as a fugue⎯and Bach turns up everywhere, to be sure. The syntactical flow is so potent it can rely on a simple comma for a major transition; it slips in and out of dialogue or violence, those more jagged rhythms, without losing cumulative effect. Such a style isn’t unique to Krasznahorkai (see William Gaddis, The Recognitions), but few writers have carried on so undaunted or shown such dexterity. Amid vast blocks of unbroken prose, action and desire develop with remarkable clarity, and there’s no mistaking the tonal shifts into threat or seduction⎯subtleties that, in English, bear out the heroic efforts of his translators, the latest the award-winning Ottilie Mulzet.

In short, by 2018 this author had hit a winning stride. Nonetheless, though he acknowledged continuing to write, Krasznahorkai declared he’d switched to shorter projects and other genres, set a long way from his Hungarian home. He brought out a brief Manhattan photo-essay. Baron Wenckheim, he insisted, was “a summary … of all my novels,” and so, “must be the last.” 

But since the interview, clearly “something has been unleashed.” I’m citing the new Herscht 07769, in size and cast and complication indisputably a novel, and moreover one which revisits a number of the author’s obsessions. The only period in its five-hundred-plus pages (also devoid of a paragraph break) comes at the end of the final line, and Krasznahorkai uses his preferred point of view, a third person that roves everywhere, even into the minds of animals. Yet he also exercises new muscles, for starters moving West, into Germany’s bucolic Thuringia⎯Bach’s homeland, wouldn’t you know it. The composer lends things a fresh specificity, too; the story not only visits local memorials, but also considers the best highway to take. And those are well-kept, post-reunification highways; set in the 2010s, it’s Angela Merkel’s Germany, and from the first she’s part of a clever recurring device.

What most sets Herscht 07769 apart, however, is the drama it whips up. An unbroken sentence might suggest a flatline, but this one’s spiked with tension. The expression I quoted, provoking a classic shiver, comes up after we’ve seen one couple attacked by wolves, another blown to smithereens, and a few people beaten to death. Worse, whatever’s “unleashed” remains a mystery; someone’s started beating people to death with his bare hands—or is it her bare hands? The unknowns create a reading experience no less than tingly, while of course badly unsettling a hitherto sleepy town called “Kana”.

This “Kana” is imaginary, unlike all the Bach sites, and given the storyteller’s near omniscience, it teems like a Bruegel canvas, with a compelling syncopation of mockery and empathy. Florian, the central figure⎯enormous but slow, he lacks the agency to be called a protagonist⎯ draws out the diversity; one man may consider him a “half-witted orphan,” but that man’s own wife calls Florian “a poor child imprisoned in the life of that beast.” The beast, known as the Boss, would be the antagonist in a more ordinary novel: leader of the town’s neo-Nazis, plotting destruction to the “lib criminal gang” he sees delivering the Fatherland to Jews and migrants. Naturally the man is anathema to some, like Nadir and Rosario, running the gas station and café. Yet the Boss too stops in at the place, and even those who detest him admit he’s saved Florian’s life, freeing the gentle giant from an asylum. Besides that, the Boss conducts the local orchestra, a woeful unit he insists can tackle that most German of masters, Johann Sebastian Bach.

In other words, there’s a fondness to how Krasznahorkai handles his cast⎯ far more various than the few folks I’ve mentioned. A later scene of a neglected woman evokes her misery with rare power, and more light-hearted moments abound, such as what Herscht does with Angela Merkel. The dim behemoth Florian is writing his head of state letter after letter; he’s the first to suffer the nebulous local unease, and he seeks her help. Yet his silliness only deepness the gathering dark:

There is no need to wait for apocalypse, for we must understand⎯ Florian wrote to Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin⎯ that apocalypse is the natural state of life, the world, the universe … the apocalypse is now….

From the mouths of babes: soon enough this little world seems to be all craters and corpses. In Kana, those who remain venture out less and less. When two or three do get together, granted, their fallen world can again glimmer with promise, with humanity, if wrongheaded as ever. Only the story's recording angel knows the whole grim truth, a hair-raising double manhunt bound to end in death. Insofar as the twinned pursuits become the central plot, it takes on a mythic implacability, as the impulse to justice leads to more innocents dying. In this Kana⎯ or Cana⎯are we witnessing the Savior’s first miracle or the ultimate triumph of the Beast? Whatever the answer, Krasznahorkai has raised the question via a triumph over his own impulse to tighten the reins on his talent, a novel so intricate and vital as to assert again one of the core purposes of creative work:

It wasn’t just the beauty … in Bach, he felt, there might be a recommendation of what to do in the event of a catastrophe…