László Krasznahorkai Writes Because He Fails

Photograph by David Zorrakino / Europa Press News / Getty Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story Every year, at the Nobel Prize banquet, in Stockholm, each laureate gives a brief, formal speech; typically, they thank the Swedish Academy and express some hope for the future of humanity. The 2025 Laureate in Literature, the Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai, made no mention of humanity’s future. He gave his thanks, instead, to its past: to the artists of classical Greece; to the Italian Renaissance; to the city of Kyoto; to Fyodor Dostoyevsky, William Faulkner, and Johann Sebastian Bach, “for the Divine.” He thanked his friends, many of whom were “no longer among the ranks of the living,” for their more personal influences on him. “I give thanks to my friend Jóska Pálnik, who told me, on the second stair of the water-slide pool in 1960, how babies are made, and under the grievous weight of this revelation, I wanted to die.”

The speech will not surprise anyone who has read Krasznahorkai’s novels. His themes are learned; his settings numerous and far-flung; his imagination apocalyptic, but very, very funny. His characters are mad men or visionaries—it can be hard to tell the difference—addled by their belief in a sacred perception of beauty, of transcendence, in a cruel and withholding world. Each novel has found its ideal English-language translator. Krasznahorkai’s earliest novels (“Satantango,” “The Melancholy of Resistance,” “War and War”) owe their bleak grandeur to the British Hungarian poet George Szirtes, while the novellas (“Chasing Homer,” “Spadework for a Palace,” “Herman”), compressed thrillers, gain their air of paranoia from the short-story writer John Batki. Most recently, the fluid and colloquial style of Ottilie Mulzet has animated “Seiobo There Below,” “A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East,” “Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming,” and “Herscht 07769.” They mark a shift in Krasznahorkai’s later writing, toward what he called an “explosive confession” that mimics how he speaks and defies tidy syntax.

In March, I interviewed Krasznahorkai at the Athens International Literature Festival. The night before, we had dinner at a restaurant below the Acropolis, then, the next morning, attended a reception in Krasznahorkai’s honor at City Hall, where he was greeted by the mayor, the mayor’s father (his copy of “Herscht 07769” in hand), a troop of bureaucrats, and, eventually, the mayor’s excitable puppy, Pericles. It reminded me of “Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming,” in which the residents of a dilapidated Hungarian town await the return of their local aristocrat, a longed-for savior, whom they greet with awkward and exaggerated pomp. But where the Baron is timid and bumbling, Krasznahorkai is expansive, charming, and courtly. Throughout the weekend, we spoke about Kafka’s love affairs, Hungarian composers, the sound of the oud, Japanese temples, and cigar shops in New England. Before we walked onstage, he saw a white speck on my black pants and, turning to the man next to me—“Thomas, with your permission”—knelt to clean the hem.