Analysis · Of course, this Nobel Prize is also political, given the Hungarian regime’s irritation with Krasznahorkai’s criticism, writes Ulrika Milles about this year’s Nobel Prize winner in Literature.
László Krasznahorkai writes about the 20th century as if he were returning to the Middle Ages. It is dark and damp, always at the end of November. People betray and are betrayed, the earth trembles beneath their steps. Sometimes they dance a disconsolate dance. If you’ve seen Béla Tarr’s film “The Turin Horse,” one of the many collaborations with Krasznahorkai, you’ll recognize yourself.
In Krasznahorkai’s novels, the collective and generations breathe, but in layers and labyrinths, as in many contemporaries of the past, because society also lives in us, not just us in society.
The last novel, “Herscht 07769, Florian Herscht’s novel about Bach” (translated by Daniel Gustafsson), is written in a single long sentence, as if the period had become a hostile punctuation mark. Not only is it difficult to read, but it also creates an opening in a story about the end. Not even the period should feel like a prison. The style is like an open palm.
Several Nobel Prize candidates, such as Michel Houellebecq and Christian Kracht, are spiritual despairers, alienated by modernity, by the sense of loss as destiny. In part, Krasznahorkai is also one of them. His great discovery, “The Melancholy of Resistance” (which you can see in a production at Dramaten in Stockholm right now), was published in 1989, during the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. It is an urtext, an apocalyptic saga about the goodness of humanity and civilization as the most vulnerable defense against catastrophe. Literature as a moat that protects against destruction, against the citizen guard, neo-Nazis, and totalitarianism.
László Krasznahorkai’s style perhaps resembles the water in such a moat, as heavy and pregnant, dark and ever-flowing. Beckett, perhaps, Claude Simon, Kafka.
The Nobel Prize was not awarded to the exiled Russian writers Maria Stepanova or Lyudmila Ulitskaya, nor to Rushdie this year, but of course, this Nobel Prize is also political, given the Hungarian regime’s irritation with Krasznahorkai’s criticisms.
A Nobel Prize-winning author must have style and conscience, and here there is always a comforting compassion in the ruthless pessimism. And the dark humor, sometimes hidden in the background, shines with melancholy. There is no reason to fear, because the worst has already happened. “Hope is a mistake,” as Krasznahorkai begins a novel. Without a period.
