‘I wanted to look at a picture so long until I could look at it no more and after that to write about what I saw in this picture and after that I would show this text to the painter, and the painter, perhaps, could make a new version of this painting, like a response, and after that I would write again, and so on, and so would come a dialogue, and perhaps from this material we could make something.’ What was the idea behind this work that alternates paintings of a black dog with your words?

His work could not be more pertinent to our times.Īs Krasznahorkai writes in The Melancholy of Resistance, faith is ‘believing that things can be different’.īut first I wanted to talk to him about another work of his, Animalinside, a beautifully published pamphlet (in The Cahiers Series) of a collaboration between the author and the German painter, Max Neumann. In Satantango (originally published 1985, see my review here), The Melancholy of Resistance (1989), and War & War (1999, all New Directions publications with translations by George Szirtes), his long and lapping sentences create a mesmerising blend of prophecy and foreboding, of darker forces met by the fragile philosophies, mysticism or instinctive defensiveness of human beings. If you’ve read his three novels thus far available in English, you will know this is not an exaggeration. Of course, I heard every word uttered by this Hungarian sage, one of the greatest European writers of our era.

‘You will hear, perhaps, almost nothing.’ ‘My voice is very frail,’ says László Krasznahorkai at the beginning of our two-hour meeting. Against the brutal, against the bad: An Interview with László Krasznahorkai

Satantango by lászló krasznahorkai