James Wood, writing in the New Yorker in 2012, placed Krasznahorkai alongside post-war greats such as Thomas Bernhard, Claude Simon and David Foster Wallace. ‘There’s nothing else like it in contemporary literature.’ ‘he excitement of Krasznahorkai’s writing is that he has come up with his own original forms…’ writes the novelist Adam Thirlwell in the New York Review of Books. So much so that on the occasion of the release of Sátántango, another Szirtes translation, in 2012, the author was mobbed by hipsters at Housing Works Bookstore in New York City, where the critic James Wood was interviewing him. Krasznahorkai, who was awarded the 2015 Man Booker International Prize last Tuesday, is widely recognised as one of the very best and important novelists of our time. Sebald (‘The universality of Krasznahorkai’s vision rivals that of Gogol’s Dead Souls and far surpasses all the lesser concerns of contemporary writing.’). It was blurbed by Susan Sontag (‘the contemporary Hungarian master of the apocalypse’) and W. In 2000, the Hungarian-born British poet George Szirtes – who conducted this interview in 2012 by email – translated Krasznahorkai’s The Melancholy of Resistance, the first of his books to appear in English. Until recently, at least in the English-speaking world, he was probably best known through the oeuvre of the film director Béla Tarr, with whom he has collaborated on several films over three decades, including the adaptation of several of his own novels.

In its measured prose and long, Tolstoyan sentences, ‘Satantango’ is nothing short of a literary masterpiece, a formal meditation on death and avarice, human fallibility and faith.Interview with László Krasznahorkai László Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, Hungary, in 1954, and has written five novels and several collections of essays and short stories. Satantango follows the villagers as they are exploited and taken in by Irimias, as they drink and stumble their way toward the gradual realization of their mistake and ultimate demise.

He soon attains a messianic aura as he plays on the fears of the townsfolk and a series of increasingly brutal events unfold. Irimias will divide and rule: his arrival heralds the beginning of a period of violence and greed for the villagers as he sets about swindling them out of a fortune that might allow them to escape the emptiness and futility of their existence. But when the charismatic Irimias – long-thought dead – returns to the commune, the villagers fall under his spell.

Flies buzz, spiders weave, water drips and animals root desultorily in the barnyard of a collective farm. In the darkening embers of a Communist utopia, life in a desolate Hungarian town has come to a virtual standstill.

Satantango by László Krasznahorkai